Many education critics, teachers, and parents have lamented the recent poor achievement scores of Japanese school-age children, and have sought the reasons for the decline. Some critics, including the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, and Science and Technology, blame the practice known as yutori-kyoiku (literally translated as…

Recall of the spatial location of objects in four object arrays was studied with subjects ranging in age between 5 and 23 years. Using pictorial materials, the procedure focused on the variation with age of conditions which affect recall of the objects and their location. (GO)

Participants were divided into three groups: (a) control group, (b) Treatment 1 involving the application of learning theory plus group therapy, and (c) Treatment 2 involving the same as Treatment 1 plus mutual help principles. Both treatment groups lost significantly more weight over a seven-week period than did the control group. (Author)

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 process of studying text material is a criteria-related, self-directed form of reading involving three phases: prereading, reading, and postreading. Prereading consists of clarifying the criteria for study, constructing a study guide, and surveying the text to determine how much is already known, how interesting it is, and how difficult or…

The main findings of a meta-analysis of 23 research reports were the following: giving behavioral objectives, learning directions, or questions before an instructional text is read leads to some improvement in the learning of goal relevant material; however, these preinstructional acts impede the learning of goal irrelevant materials. (Author/BW)

Adults in their twenties and sixties were tested for free recall, cued recall, and recognition of words that they had studied in an intentional memory task or generated associations to in an incidental orienting task. Significant age-related declines in performance on intentional items were observed regardless of type of memory test. (Author)

Two groups of retarded adults were trained to use a cumulative rehearsal strategy for a serial recall task. Subjects who received instructions emphasizing the intended purpose and potential uses of the trained strategy performed significantly better than subjects invited to participate in "a remembering task." (Author/SJL)

Discusses the volitional basis of Personality Systems Interaction Theory (PSI) and applies it to the improvement of conditions for learning and psychological treatment. The theory explains motivational and volitional phenomena, including concentration, coping with failure, identification and intrinsic commitment to personal goals, persistence, and…

Comparison for memory for spatial location of 30 persons with and 30 persons without mental retardation found the control group recalled more intentionally learned than incidentally learned locations. The experimental group performed better after incidental learning than after intentional learning and scored as highly as controls on incidental…

Instructing people to forget a list of items often leads to better recall of subsequently studied lists (known as the benefits of directed forgetting). The authors have proposed that changes in study strategy are a central cause of the benefits (L. Sahakyan & P. F. Delaney, 2003). The authors address 2 results from the literature that are…

This article reports an error concerning the article "Directed Forgetting in Incidental Learning and Recognition Testing: Support for a Two-Factor Account" by Lili Sahakyan and Peter F. Delaney ("Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition," Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 789-801). The article was misidentified in the July issue as an…

Examination was made of subject-generated as compared to experimenter-provided underlining of sentences that were least or most important to the overall structure of the passage presented. Additionally, some readers were instructed to underline any one sentence per paragraph, while others were asked simply to read the passage. (Author/BJG)

Article considered whether one should be able to obtain - by selecting the appropriate orienting task - incidental learning that is superior to ordinary intentional learning. (Author/RK)