Some 1750 sketch maps drawn in response to three sets of instructions by residents of, and commuters to, Staten Island and 138 extended interviews with residents suggest that informal learning is largely independent of formal learning. Cognitive maps which individuals form are practical instruments frequently bearing no resemblance to commercial…

This study examines the hypothesis that the interaction between a student's achievement orientation and the teaching style to which he is exposed differentially affects both the amount of learning that takes place and the degree of expressed satisfaction with the scholastic environment. One hundred students, selected because of their extreme…

Innovative models for education are often quickly adopted. Behavior modification, or operant conditioning, is an example of a technique which has been widely used because, when properly applied in the classroom, it "works." However, the application of a technique should be carefully thought through in terms of the meaning of the behavior in…

This study determines whether a simulation game affects attitudes, and increases motivation and cognitive learning. Seventy-six college students in four sections of a political science course were the subjects. Random selection placed them in two treatment groups and two control groups. Both groups received the game, and one treatment group and…

This document reports on research aimed at establishing effective methods for training Navy marginal personnel designated as Group 4. Preliminary investigation of training in mathematics showed that Group 4 personnel needed to improve in basic arithmetic skills and that they varied widely in their ability to acquire such skills. An experimental…

In a study made in 1949 to determine the increment in learning that could be attributed to repetition, four general science films were shown to each of four groups of college students in such a way that each group saw one of the films once, a second film twice, a third film three times, and a fourth film four times. The experimental population…

An increase in the amount of material to be learned increases the difficulty of the learning task. The function describing this length difficulty relation was obtained by measuring the amount of time 20 college students spent studying arrays of four, six, eight, and ten consonants before they were ready to be tested on them. Identification and…

This study obtains evidence for the effect of time of day on learning in a stressful situation. A series of five experiments were performed to assess the effects of this variable on learning using albino rat subjects. None of the experiments provide overwhelming evidence for the effect of time of day when taken alone and each leaves questions…

The project was concerned with developing and testing self-instructional programs in communication skills for high school students. Initially the programs were presented in printed form; later two forms of presentation were used, printed and auditory. In the pilot studies students were put through the learning exercises individually. Two programs…

The purpose of this paper is to develop the framework for a teaching methodology based on the concept of experience, especially as that concept has been defined by John Dewey. The discussion is divided into three parts and the first section provides a summation and analysis of behavioral objectives (the current methodology). It is stressed that…

Fourteen dimensions of the social climate of learning of high school classes were examined in their relationships to the size of the classes concerned. Two data samples included in the study were 149 classes participating in the 1967 evaluation of the Harvard Project Physics course and 61 classes in the Montreal Metropolitan area in a variety of…

Exhibit development, as conceived in this report, is an evolutionary process, drawing the museum visitor into the collaborative venture of testing and improving the exhibits. The findings of contemporary learning research were put to work in the arrangement of activities and specimens that engaged children through self-instructional sequences. The…

This study investigated the effects of informative feedback on a matching task with three combinations of verbal feedback and three levels of task complexity. The three types of feedback were right wrong (RW), nothing wrong (NW), and right nothing (RN). The three levels of task complexity were defined in terms of number of irrelevant stimulus…

Forty-five students divided into six experimental groups were given a programed presentation using teaching machines, which included different feedback procedures. The most efficient feedback procedure was that of administering a specific review until the criterion frame performance was correct. The least efficient procedure was that of repeating…

This study investigated the effect of learning task, instructional quality, and teacher on three indices of Perseverance: Attending Time, Distractability, and Attention Span. Data were secured from 219 students learning elementary school mathematics in an individualized instruction program, the Individually Prescribed Instruction (IPI) system…