While online and face-to-face (F2F) courses have been compared in numerous studies, there has been a lack of focus on online chemistry courses. This study was conducted to compare the success of students instructed in an online or F2F general chemistry course for non-majors. One hundred forty six exam questions were categorized according to…

In the context of an upper-level psychology course, even when students were given an opportunity to refer to text containing the answers and change their exam responses in order to improve their exam scores, their performance on these questions improved slightly or not at all. Four experiments evaluated competing explanations for the students'…

Do children and adults use the same cues to judge whether someone is a reliable source of information? In 4 experiments, we investigated whether children (ages 5 and 6) and adults used information regarding accuracy, confidence, and calibration (i.e., how well an informant's confidence predicts the likelihood of being correct) to judge informants'…

Recent studies have shown that children with mathematics difficulties (MD) have weaknesses in multiple areas of mathematics. Andersson, for example, recently found that children with MD perform significantly worse than other children on clock reading tasks. The present study builds on this recent finding and aims at a more profound understanding…

Two related topics of interest to educational psychologists are those of meaningful versus rote learning and discovery versus reception techniques of teaching. (CK)

Comparative theory testing is a useful method for assessing the value of a new theoretical account such as the memory bias account of optimistic time predictions. However, such comparisons can be misleading when they do not carefully consider the domain limitations of the respective theories. M. M. Roy, N. J. S. Christenfeld, and C. R. M. McKenzie…

Elaborative rehearsal strategies rather than nonelaborative rehearsal strategies (repetition only) discriminated between the two groups of fifth and sixth graders. The organizational ability represented in elaborative rehearsal strategies was the hypothesized mechanism responsible for the better long-term memory and total recall observed in…

A detailed investigation of short-term memory storage, long-term memory storage and semantic memory associated with developmental dyslexia is reported. Fifty-one dyslexic and 28 control children (ages 8-14) were tested and specific deficits in each area were identified among the dyslexic children. (Author/SJL)

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of aging on the storage of visual and spatial working memory according to Logie's model of working memory (1995). In a first experiment young, elderly, and very old subjects carried out two tasks usually used to measure visual span (Visual Patterns Test) and spatial span (Corsi Block Tapping test).…

Studies (2) of auditory memory performance are reported. Children were asked to recall material which permitted different language habits to be used (structural, and meaningful). Lower socio-economic status (LSES) Negro children performed more like their middle socio-economic status white (MSES) counterparts on non-contingent strings. When…

The sustained attention of 16 mildly retarded and 16 nonretarded adults was assessed during 2 60-minute vigilance tests differing in memory demand. Performance of retarded subjects declined more rapidly in later stages than did that of the nonretarded subjects. Implications for the study of memory load are discussed. (SLD)

Spatial span (Corsi's block tapping) and verbal span (Wechsler Digits Forward) were measured in 1113 children (ages 4-10) from urban and rural districts of Italy. The urban group performed significantly better on both tests. Sex differences, favoring boys, were found only on the spatial span test. (Author/SJL)