To be able to support young children in learning to learn--an ability that requires adapting often-unprecedented changes in society--teachers need to be aware of the ways in which children understand learning. In this qualitative study, 177 micro-interviews conducted with 41 Finnish children were analysed using an abductive method to understand…

"Statistical Learning" (SL) involves the extraction of organizing principles from a set of inputs. Recent advances in SL suggest that SL is a componential construct. To better characterize the componential nature of SL, a strategy may be to turn to literature regarding memory and learning. The current study sought to extend the…

When observers search for a target object, they incidentally learn the identities and locations of "background" objects in the same display. This learning can facilitate search performance, eliciting faster reaction times for repeated displays. Despite these findings, visual search has been successfully modeled using architectures that maintain no…

We investigated the impact of readers' visuo-spatial (VS) capacity on their incidental learning of page links during the exploration of simple hierarchical hypertextual documents. Forty-three university students were asked to explore a series of hypertexts for a limited period of time. Then the participants were asked to recall the layout and the…

Memory improves when encoding and retrieval processes overlap. Here, we investigated how the neural bases of long-term memory encoding vary as a function of the degree to which functional processes engaged at study are engaged again at test. In an incidental learning paradigm, electrical brain activity was recorded from the scalps of healthy…

Informal learning and its validation has become a major issue in European and national education policy, raising the following questions. May learning be constituent for political action? Is learning the focus of validation? Is informality a feature of learning? Is implicit learning solely related to informality? To give answers, a general…

This experimental study evaluated the effectiveness of direct teaching of new vocabulary items in reading passages. The study compared vocabulary learning under a reading only condition (incidental learning) to learning that is aided by direct communication of word meanings (explicit learning). Three levels of vocabulary knowledge (form recall,…

College students received either one half of the objectives for a certain test or no objectives at all. The subjects with objectives performed better than those without on posttest items referenced to their objectives (relevant learning) and less well on items not covered (incidental learning). Findings conflict with previous research. (Author/SE)

Examines the relationship between the number of learning goals and decreased performance on goal-relevant test items, and explores characteristics of goal-descriptive directions that influence the recall of incidental information from text. (BJG)

Discusses an out of school social and educational experience for hearing-impaired children. (RB)

The results suggest that coding for storage in the short-term memory is effective when learning occurs under incidental conditions; however, long-term storage appears to be significantly affected by the intention to learn and the foreknowledge of a recall test. (MM)

Argues that adult educators use "learning" when they mean "education" and that this confounds and demeans incidental and informal learning processes. Suggests that intended, purposeful planned learning should properly be termed education and that there is no such thing as a nonlearner. (SK)

Suggests an increase with age in children's ability to focus on essential content from a media presentation. Children in early adolescence seemed better able than younger ones to ignore nonessential information. (WY)

The primary finding of this study was that performance increments found with whole presentations of instructional objectives could be achieved with part presentation of objectives and text. In fact, the part presentations resulted in ever greater intentional learning than whole presentations. (Author/BJG)

The purposes of this study were to replicate and extend the list learning results in a prose context, and to explore both the learning of incidental material and the effect of a text organization pretest and posttest information about passage structure. One hundred twenty-eight college undergraduates read a 460 word prose story, which mentioned…