The purpose of the eight studies reported in this paper was two-fold: to identify some of the relationships that exist between the unique properties of diagrams and various aspects of cognitive processes and learning, and, subsequently, to derive principles from these relationships that would direct the design and use of diagrams in the classroom.…

Children 3 1/2 and 5 years of age were tested for their intuitive knowledge of the psychological fact that one mental event may trigger or cue another related mental event. (JMB)

This study investigated the effect of two problem-solving techniques: (a) free-association with a direct reference to the problem, called shortly direct, and (b) free-association with a remote and postponed reference to the problem, called remote, on fluency and originality of ideas in solving ill-structured problems. The research design…

This study used five cueing systems composed of 16 cues each in combination with three topical areas to form cue-topic pairs which acted as stimulus items for the retrieval of naturally stored information. The five cue systems were composed of: randomly selected words, randomly selected nouns, the Wilson and Arnold system, a modification of the…

A cognitive, nonintrusive method of controlling head-rocking behavior in an 11-year-old blind subject involved having the boy place his hand on his cheek or chin when prompted that he was rocking his head. The subject demonstrated significant decreases in head rocking during intervention and generalization during followup. (Author/JDD)

Students (grades 7-8) with and without learning disabilities (LD) wrote stories for which a beginning, middle, end, or no prompt was given. Results indicated differences between groups in quantity and quality of story production. LD subjects scored significantly lower when offered the middle prompt than other prompts, perhaps because of their…

A study found simultaneous prompting procedures were effective in teaching environmental word identification to five students (ages 6-11) with moderate intellectual disabilities and that they were able to acquire additional instructive feedback stimuli presented on either a continuous or an intermittent presentation schedule, regardless of…

Research based on author's doctoral dissertation, submitted to the Graduate School of the University of California at Los Angeles.

Prompts in concept classification normally occur on the stimulus, while in memorization tasks prompts customarily are given on the response. Opposite results have been obtained for these two tasks with excessive prompting. This study used English-Russian word pairs to compare stimulus prompts (underlining the English word) with response prompts in…

Examined whether children (ages 4-5) were, like adults, capable of using precued information to preselect a response and remember it briefly. Findings suggest that the 10 preschoolers could preselect a response and maintain it for about one second, but they had difficulty over a 3- or 5-second delay. (Author/SJL)

One hundred forty-four subjects received 4 Brown-Peterson trials with recall triads from a common encoding category. Items on three trials were from a common subset, while on the fourth, the subset was shifted or not, and a cue was presented or not. The cue influenced response generation, a shift improved recall. (CHK)

Data were generally consistent with the view that preschoolers and elementary schoolers can respond to memory probes by applying arithmetical processing to running gist from recently solved problems. Discussed are two competing interpretations of the development of working memory: fuzzy-trace theory and the generic-resources hypothesis. (Author/RH)

Discusses writing instruction and the use of educational computer programs; provides a theoretical framework that includes cognitive tool partnerships, learning theory, writing research, and the Vygotskian theory of mediated learning; and describes a prompting tool that used the macro language of IBM's WordPerfect with college and middle school…

This paper discusses guidelines for devising a hierarchy when fading response prompts in training individuals with developmental disabilities. Existing guidelines are seen as poorly defined, inconsistent, and lacking both theoretical and experimental support. An alternative theoretical account is proposed which suggests that prompts in a hierarchy…