Previous research shows that children effectively extract and utilize causal information, yet we find that adults doubt children's ability to understand complex mechanisms. Since adults themselves struggle to explain how everyday objects work, why expect more from children? Although remembering details may prove difficult, we argue that exposure…

The purpose of the study is to examine the role of spatial ability and attention shifting in reading of illustrated science texts. Thirty-five fourth/fifth elementary students read two science texts. Prior knowledge and retention/transfer learning outcomes were measured using researcher-developed measures. While reading, students' eye movements…

Abstraction is a core principle of Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs) that learn semantic representations for words by applying dimensional reduction to statistical redundancies in language. Although the posited learning mechanisms vary widely, virtually all DSMs are prototype models in that they create a single abstract representation of a…

Ambridge argues that there is widespread agreement among child language researchers that learners store linguistic abstractions. In this commentary the authors first argue that this assumption is incorrect; anti-representationalist/exemplar views are pervasive in theories of child language. Next, the authors outline what has been learned from this…

We can now get purposefully directed in the way we assess our learners in light of the emergence of evidence from the field of neuroscience. Why higher-order learning or abstract concepts need to be the focus in assessment is elaborated using the knowledge of semantic and episodic memories. With most of our learning identified to be implicit, why…

There are many reasons to be curious about the way people learn, and the past several decades have seen an explosion of research that has important implications for individual learning, schooling, workforce training, and policy. In 2000, "How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition" was published and its…

Gestalt psychologists proposed two distinct learning mechanisms. Associative learning occurs gradually through the repeated co-occurrence of external stimuli or memories. Insight learning occurs suddenly when people discover new relationships within their prior knowledge as a result of reasoning or problem solving processes that re-organize or…

Reports three experiments demonstrating that recall for words increases with deeper levels of processing and with longer rehearsal intervals. Asserts that there is no interaction between those strategies. (PMJ)

Twelve mildly mentally retarded and 12 MA-matched nonretarded individuals were tested for speed and accuracy in responding to questions requiring different processing depth and then given an unexpected recognition task. Retarded individuals required progressively more encoding time relative to nonretarded individuals as processing depth increased.…

Recognition errors of children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 were examined. Subjects learned words under intentional or incidental instructions and were tested immediately or 48 hours later. Subjects had to choose a target word from among acoustic, conceptual, associative and neutral distractors. The immediate recognition of 2nd-grade subjects was…

In this study on the interactive effects of advance organizers and reasoning skills, 112 undergraduates read a literature text preceded by either a comparative advance organizer or a placebo introduction. Results suggest that instructional organizers produce neither serious loss nor substantial benefits for many purposes of communication. (BS)

The ability of preverbal infants to abstract a prototypical representation of a category, when presented with examples of an artifically constructed category, was investigated. It was determined that infants could process visual information constructively and could take a more active role in category formation than previously believed. (Author/MH)

Reasoning and logical thinking can be defined and explained from different perspectives. Three approaches are reviewed in this report; they are: (1) the logical structure approach; (2) the Piagetian approach of developmental stages; and (3) the information processing or memory approach. Four hypotheses related to these approaches were investigated…

The purpose of this study was to provide a more complete understanding of the storage and retrieval processes of developmentally different youngsters. Forty-four second and fourth grade subjects were given a lesson consisting of 25 facts to learn and remember. Half of the group learned the facts in a context containing superordinate statements…