The topic of physical and chemical changes is one of the basic and essential issues of both the lowersecondary school science curriculum and the upper-secondary school chemistry curriculum in many countries. The focus of the present study is to investigate the students' cognitive structures on the topic of physical and chemical changes at…

This study aims to determine the changes in the cognitive structures of the 35 participants after ecology-based nature education in Bursa Uludag and its vicinity. This study used a single group pretest-posttest experimental mode where the data was collected by a word association test. It included the key concepts of nature, national parks,…

Recent semantic space models learn vector representations for word meanings by observing statistical redundancies across a text corpus. A word's meaning is represented as a point in a high-dimensional semantic space, and semantic similarity between words is quantified by a function of their spatial proximity (typically the cosine of the angle…

Significant variation exists in how native speakers respond to word association tasks and challenges the usage of nativelikeness as a benchmark to gauge second language (L2) performance. However, the influence of word class and trials of elicitation is not sufficiently addressed in previous work. With controlled stimuli from multiple word classes,…

This article argues that, across different psychological contexts, the methods of data collection, treatment, and analysis in word association tests have hitherto been inconsistent. We demonstrate that this inconsistency has resulted from inadequate control, in previous studies, of certain important variables including the basis of norm…

This study investigated: 1) the influence of alphabet instructional content (letter names, letter sounds, or both) on alphabet learning and engagement of English only and dual language learner (DLL) children, and 2) the relation between children's initial status and growth in three underlying cognitive learning processes (paired-associate,…

The present study is an attempt to empirically test and compare the results of three methods of word association (WA) analysis. Two of the methods--namely, associative commonality and nativelikeness, and lexico-syntactic patterns of associative organization--have been traditionally used in both first language (L1) and second language (L2)…

Four experiments evaluate the effectiveness of a two-stage mnemonic procedure, the keyword method, for learning Spanish vocabulary. This method proved highly effective, yielding in one experiment a final test score of 88 percent correct for the keyword group compared to 28 percent for the control group. (Author/RC)

Investigates the difference between two groups of adolescents learning basic science from the same curriculum (Scottish Integrated Science) but in two different languages and cultural settings. Word association tests distinguished between the groups, with the Malay children producing more associations than the Scottish children. (Author/JJD)