Thirty subjects were presented with a visual form discrimination task requiring them to match Roman letters when a variety of transformations were held constant. They were given massed practice across four blocks of eight stimuli. Results of a repeated measures analysis of variance showed support for the distinctive features hypothesis. (JC)

Examined 2-year-olds' comprehension and production of novel nouns, verbs, or actions at 3 intervals after training conducted in massed or distributed exposures. Found that for comprehension, children learned all item types in all training conditions at all retention intervals. Production was better for nonverbal actions than for either word type…

Sixty-one undergraduate students used a taxonomic instructional aid, a mnemonic aid, or their own methods to master the content of a passage describing a plant classification system and the distinguishing characteristics of the plant groups within that system. The demonstrated advantages of mnemonic strategies are discussed. (SLD)

Develops a metaphor of qualitative research as jazz to illuminate qualities that are embedded in the processes of qualitative inquiry. The jazz metaphor is said to create a pathway for making explicit the tacit understandings that permit qualitative research to flow and to be guided by the new findings and emerging understandings it uncovers. (GLR)

Two studies compared the effects of imagery-based instruction and rote learning on the long-term recall of English translations of Chinese ideographs. In no instance was there any indication that imagery-based mnemonics conferred an advantage beyond the immediate test of recall. (27 references) (Author/LB)

Discusses the need to develop theoretical models, both behaviorist and constructivist, for distance learning design and methods of assessment. Topics include metaphors; sources of model development and delivery; organization of learning; and sources for research and evaluation, including comparison group research designs and within group variance…

Two experiments examined 8-month-olds' use of absolute and relative pitch cues in a tone-sequence statistical learning task. Results suggest that, given unsegmented stimuli that do not conform to rules of musical composition, infants are more likely to track patterns of absolute pitches than of relative pitches. A third experiment found that adult…

Two experiments investigated the acquisition of English comparative adjective forms, "Adj+er" and "more Adj." In Experiment 1, 72 children, four- and seven-years-old, indicated their preferences for the synthetic or periphrastic comparative form for 16 adjectives in a forced-choice judgement task; their responses were compared to those of a group…

The present study was conducted to test predictions derived from the hypothesis that depression may serve the purpose of adaptively facilitating disengagement from obsolete cognitive plans. Groups of students with either low or high depression scores were contrasted using a procedure that featured an initial learning phase, within which…

The study was designed to investigate the learning processes in discrimination shift learning, in terms of developmental views of "logical manipulation by classification." Tasks comparing sizes of intradimensional value-classes and comparing sizes of interdimensional value-classes were devised in order to measure subjects' levels of…

A study compared adult learners and traditional undergraduate students in terms of three communication traits that may affect the quality and quantity of communication in the classroom. The study investigated whether adult learners differed significantly from traditional undergraduate students in terms of communication apprehension, willingness to…

A three-part study compared similarity-based learning (in which concepts are formed based on similarity among multiple examples) and explanation-based learning (in which general schema are acquired from a single example) in schema acquisition. Subjects, 16 undergraduates enrolled in introductory psychology courses at the University of Illinois and…

This study sought to determine if 17 affective variables on the Canfield Learning Styles Inventory Form S-A would discriminate among teaching areas of Mississippi public school teachers. The learning style inventory was administered to 86 teachers grouped into four teaching areas: elementary, secondary, special education, and others (library…