Two groups of undergraduates differing in reading ability were tested on a number of reaction-time tasks designed to determine the speed of encoding visual information at several different levels, tests of sensory functions, verbal and quantitative reasoning ability, short-term auditory memory span, and ability to comprehend spoken text.…

This review of 20 studies examines 3 predictions concerning the effects of conceptual models on students' understanding of scientific prose: (1) that models improve recall of conceptual information; (2) that they decrease verbatim retention; and (3) that they increase creative solutions on transfer problems. (SLD)

This paper reports on the learning of difficult and complex concepts, the characteristics of these concepts that make them difficult for students to learn and understand well, the kinds of misconceptions students acquire, and the difficulty of changing these mistaken beliefs. A scheme, the Conceptual Stability Scheme, is presented for analyzing a…

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that readers make inferences if those inferences are necessary for the reconstruction of the writer's model. Each experiment involved the same 42 subjects who read a series of short passages. The first experiment examined inferences pertaining either to the underlying global situation of a…

Two experiments tested the Conceptual Dependency Theory, stating that verbs are represented in memory as combinations of actions and relations encoding underlying conceptual structure. Experiment I results supported the conceptual complexity hypothesis, while II rejected complexity for imagery as the predictor of performance. (CHK)

The study investigated preferences shown by 25 preschool children regarding the handier toy, the smaller toy, the more probable toy, the animate noun, and the first-mentioned noun as agent in interpreting semantically reversible sentences prior to adult performance. (Author/SBH)

Describes two studies designed to determine how children in first through third grades become aware of their failure to comprehend instructions. Results suggested that children's initial insensitivity to their own comprehension failure is due to a relative lack of constructive processing. (JMB)

Describes two experiments that look at how a reader identifies and represents the major topics in a text and their interrelationships. The first experiment demonstrates that readers show on-line sensitivity to the organization of major text topics. The second experiment investigates the nature of such on-line processing of topic structure. (SED)

A total of 96 children ages five, six, and seven were asked to judge the acceptability of eight three-sentence "stories" told by a puppet and to justify their responses. Stories differed in whether they were consistent or inconsistent and in whether the principle upon which the story's consistency depended was implicitly or explicitly…

Research supported in part by a Public Health Service Research grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. (VM)

Disputes several assumptions made by Gazzaniga in the preceding article, namely: (l) that any capacity to extract meaning from spoken or written words indicates linguistic competence; and (2) that the right hemisphere is passive and nonresponsive and that the limits of its cognitive abilities are manifested in simple matching-to-sample tasks. (GC)

Examines research to determine whether the commonly recommended procedure of determining a student's potential reading level via listening comprehension is valid for the primary grades. Concludes that it is not. (FL)

Analytic (field independent) and global (field dependent) styles of learning in 96 sixth graders were tested using two instructional design techniques. Results indicate incorporation of attention directing techniques into an audio lesson will significantly enhance learning for analytic individuals. (Author/JEG)