Contrasts between children's visualization and understanding of a filmed story and of a story in print are drawn in the introduction of this symposium paper. Discussion then briefly focuses on variables related to studying effects of story pictures on viewers, such as the story-line, audience characteristics, and the coordination of story modality…

A study investigated children's ability to distinguish among literal, metaphorical, and anomalous comparisons. The 100 subjects, equal numbers of three-, four-, five-, and six-year-old children and college students, completed similarity statements by choosing one of two words from (1) a metaphorical/literal word pair, (2) a literal/anomalous word…

While stimulus-response theories of learning maintain the reality and importance of the stimulus outside the perception of the person, a cognitive-field learning theory insists that, in order to make meaning, a person must perceive and react with the stimulus. Holding to this or any learning model has implications for the following: a definition…

F. C. Bartlett's concept of "attitude" is used in this paper as a point of departure for the creation of a model of the complementary functioning of discursive and experiential memorial representation. The paper first discusses several of the memorial functions of experiential representation, in particular the integrative function…

Prereading teaching strategies that help students connect schemata in their head with the information on the page are important components of reading instruction. Three prereading strategies that serve the purpose of stimulating linking activity are posing related questions, presenting reaction statements, and introducing concept stimuli. Related…

In a study investigating the nature of questioning, a group of subjects with little relevant knowledge and a group with a great deal of relevant knowledge were asked to prepare a chocolate mousse. During the preparation, the subjects were allowed to ask any number of questions and each was answered immediately. Results showed that the number of…

Contending that previous investigations into the efficacy of underlining as a study technique have yielded mixed results due to the specific experimental methodologies employed, a study addressed the issue by manipulating both the reading comprehension skills of students and the kind of information given to them about underlining. Specifically,…

Students (N=22) enrolled in secondary school biology were evaluated for their abilities to use: combinatorial logic; correlational reasoning; separation and control of variables; exclusion of irrelevant variables; proportional reasoning; and probabilistic reasoning. Each student responded individually to six Piagetian tasks designed to measure…

This report describes four experiments on various aspects of memory for connected discourse. The first experiment dealt with preexperimental dispositions to respond to sentences and showed that people do come to experiments with biases; therefore, control of materials is necessary in this research area. The second experiment studied the…

One of the most typical ways in which people learn is by inferring general rules from examples. In recent years, significant progress has been made toward understanding how learning from examples can occur, determining when it does occur, and identifying conditions that promote it. This paper reviews these results and then suggests a program of…

An experimental context designed to directly affect discourse processing by inducing subjects to generate inferences involving text content was compared to a context in which subjects simply listened to and recalled the content of a text. Context did effect the amount of inferred and overgeneralized semantic information in subjects' text recalls.…

An integrated, three-dimensional cognitive model of reading comprehension was used to investigate the relationship between Piagetian theory (classificational reasoning abilities that emphasize the tacit use of metalinguistic concepts), and reading acquisition (word recognition and reading comprehension). Twenty-four second and third grade remedial…

A series of studies was conducted to: (1) examine the effects of headings on both recall (a memory task) and retrieval (a search task) from the same text; and (2) distinguish between retrieval from unfamiliar text and retrieval from familiar text. Pupils aged between 14 and 15 years of mixed reading ability took part in six separate studies, each…

The schema theory of comprehension as it relates to understanding while reading is reviewed in this report. Several techniques for the study of on-line measurement of comprehension are described that are based on a series of ten stories, each with two versions. The report notes that when subjects were asked to generate interpretations of stories…

Expository passages containing either main point inconsistencies, detail inconsistencies, or no inconsistencies were presented sentence by sentence to 90 college students. Subjects read through the passages at their own pace and were encouraged to reread sections of text whenever they wished. As expected, subjects spent more time on sentences…