It is proposed that many phenomena of human hypothesis testing can be understood in terms of a general positive test strategy. With this strategy, there is a tendency to test cases that are expected to have the property of interest rather than those expected to lack that property. (Author/LMO)

ABOUT 70 FEMALE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS PARTICIPATED IN THIS INVESTIGATION OF THE EFFECT OF SOCIAL PRESSURE ON CONCEPT IDENTIFICATION TASKS AND ITS TRANSFER EFFECT FROM ONE TASK TO ANOTHER. THE SUBJECTS WERE RANDOMLY ASSIGNED TO FIVE EXPERIMENTAL GROUPS -- (1) A CONTROL GROUP WITHOUT FEEDBACK, (2) A VERIDICAL GROUP WITH CORRECT FEEDBACK ON THE TWO…

TWO EXPERIMENTS WERE CONDUCTED TO DETERMINE THE EFFECTS OF POSTFEEDBACK (POST-IF) INTERVALS OF DIFFERENT LENGTHS ON OVERALL PERFORMANCE IN CONCEPT IDENTIFICATION PROBLEMS. THE POST-IF INTERVAL REPRESENTS THE TIME BETWEEN PRESENTATION OF INFORMATIVE FEEDBACK ON ONE TRIAL AND THE ONSET OF THE NEXT STIMULUS PATTERN. THE EXPERIMENTS WERE DESIGNED TO…

Resultant Achievement Motivation scores employed as predictors of performance under conditions of differing rates of informational feedback in a concept learning task were found to be positively related to learning in a 100 percent feedback condition. (Author/KM)

A schema is best understood as a statistically defined concept. Schematic concept formation consists of abstracting the common elements or properties of a defined class in a schema. Thereafter, both discrimination and retention are facilitated, since only deviations from the schema need be processed for any particular class exemplar. In the…

Delay and completeness of verbal information feedback were investigated within a transfer of learning paradigm involving concept formation. An experiment with 192 undergraduates indicates that, although delay of feedback (up to 30 seconds) slows speed of learning on the initial task, it has positive effects on the transfer task. (SLD)

Infants ranging in age from six months to eight months were shown repeated instances of real object movement-disappearance-reappearance. Results suggest that the key changes in early cognitive development rest primarily upon the infant's gradual adaptation of old responses through encounters with new events--rather than upon the acquisition of…

Two concept-learning experiments using adult human Ss were carried out, the first tested prediction using a reversal shift, the second tested speed of shift learning. (Author/RK)

College students read two passages. Four groups answered questions requiring either a summary, a new example of the concept, a list of critical attributes of the concept, or identification of a new example. The "identify post-question group" showed the greatest accuracy in classifying new examples. (Author/MH)

Preschool children were trained to acquire transitivity, conservation, and class inclusion of length via feedback to their judgments. Feedback was found to facilitate the learning of all three concepts. (ST)

Hypothesis behavior on three dimensional concept attainment problems was measured for 48 children (12 each at grades K, 2, 4, and 6). Every feedback trial was followed by a blank trial, a procedure that provided separate measures of Ss' ability to use hypotheses and test hypotheses. A S was considered to be "using" when his hypothesis inferred…

A series of papers will be written to review in a comprehensive fashion the literature related to 3 categories of variables in concept learning: task variables, stimulus variables, and learner variables. This paper, the first of the series, focuses on task variables. Research dealing with instructions, temporal factors, and feedback is critically…

This study examined effects of five combinations of four instructional variables on student learning. Subjects were 168 graduate students ernolled in a course in educational research at Arizona State University, Tempe. The five versions of the instructional program used in this study were constructed from cues, examples, practice items, and…