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…

An aspect of problem solving ability was identified by the investigator as "mathelation" and was defined to be the ability to translate and to fit idealized real-world problem situations into appropriate mathematical expressions or models. The study involved three phases: (1) the construction and validation of an instrument to measure mathelation;…

Biological principles related to the theme "photosynthesis and Energy Relationships" were specified, ordered according to Gagne's hierarchical learning theory, and their attainment by students in grades 5, 7, and 9 measured by a 100-item test developed for the purpose. Each succeeding grade level achieved significantly higher scores;…

This study examines the effects on long-term retention of variations in intensity and temporal parameters of arousal following a single learning trial in a paired-associate task. Intensity of arousal was manipulated by using two levels of noise, 75 db. and 90 db., and a condition without noise. Noise was delivered to the 56 female university…

This paper examines the sequence and hierarchy of objectives in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) "Science--A Process Approach" curriculum. The work of Piaget, Bruner forms a framework from which the learning objectives and tasks in the AAAS science curriculum are examined. The points of correspondence…

The purpose was to develop and implement a strategy for organizing a curriculum into a system having explicit structural mediators of positive transfer from lower- to higher-order objectives. This was cast as a mathematical system, and three axioms were specified so that the system was characterized by composition and reversibility. A set of…

Conceptual problems were administered in two formats, rule learning and attribute identification, to 192 college students. The stimulus patterns were gemoetric designs. Results showed that bidimensional concepts about the patterns were retained nearly perfectly up through periods of one week, without intevening practice. The one exception was…

A theory that there is a correspondence between Piagetian conservation operations and groups of symmetry transformations, and that these symmetry transformations may be used in explaining human problem solving behaviors, is developed in this paper. Current research in artificial intelligence is briefly reviewed, then details of the symmetry…

The purpose of the study was to gain information regarding the interaction between ten mental factors selected from Guilford's Structure of the Intellect Model and learning, transfer, and retention of a mathematical concept studied with and without a physical model. The meaning of place value in different number bases was studied by 202 seventh…

This paper discusses recent research on cognition and its implications for mathematics education. Learning as a generative process, structural organization, processing of information, processes and structures, individual differences, brain research, higher-order processes, motivation, and delay-retention effects are discussed. (MS)

The purpose of this study was to (1) compare the semantic relationships among common nouns obtained via two different measurement procedures and (2) determine if the use of these relationships to classify the various words results in differential degrees of learning when the stimuli are cast in terms of the paired-associate learning paradigm.…

Two vocabulary tasks--one production and one recognition--were compared with the expectation that the recognition task would yield better performance than the production task. The pairs of pictures used in the recognition task were divided into eight groups defined on target and distractor frequency and same-different conceptual category…

The author examined relationships between message organization, message uncertainty, and verbal learning. Message organization was manipulated by varying the distance between repeated subject-verb-object triples in a sequence of sentences. Message uncertainty was defined as the uncertainty (variability) of word selections for subjects responding…

To investigate whether trained flexibility would generalize to a novel discrimination task and to novel preferred and nonpreferred dimensions, 40 institutionalized retarded children and adults (IQ 50-77) were trained on five two-choice simultaneous-discriminations. Control subjects were trained with a preferred dimension relevant, the others…

In a review of over 25 empirical investigations of effects of communicating behavioral objectives to students, several trends were apparent. Advance knowledge of behavioral objectives led to improved posttest performance in five of ten studies and to improved retention in two of three instances. Only two of seven studies found an interaction…