Young adolescents have diverse learning needs. If teachers accommodated the complete learning cycle by designing instructional units that began with romance activities, led to precision opportunities, and culminated in generalization projects, students could develop their diverse talents while avoiding boredom with uninspiring precision…

This study investigated the spontaneous use of verbal mediators in discrimination learning, the transfer of mediators to a free recall task, and the effects of a pretraining task on performance. The discrimination tasks required nursery school children (80) to: (1) sort three instances each of two different concepts in a conceptually consistent…

A basic unsolved problem in science is that of understanding learning, the process by which people and machines use their experience in a situation to guide future action in similar situations. The ideas of Piaget, Pavlov, Hull, and other learning theorists, as well as previous heuristic programing models of human intelligence, stimulated this…

Examines Krashen's Monitor hypothesis (claiming that no interface exists between acquisition and learning) and finds it inadequate due to the over-restrictive conditions necessary for its use. Alternative acquisition theories and ways in which to monitor under less restrictive conditions are also examined, and a communicative trigger is proposed…

Discusses issues and problems concerning concept development among students in elementary social studies programs. Suggests good teaching uses analogies and metaphors to facilitate learning. Recommends illustrating key concepts through myths, fables, and parables. Argues that using stories that show how things work allows students to apply the…

While previous research has demonstrated a correspondence between measures of instructional content and psychological structure due to learning, this research report examines whether individual learner differences affect this correspondence. Individuals of the field independence psychological structure were expected to impose greater structure and…

The four experiments of this study represent the first stage on a program of research designed to clarify the nature and development of certain implicit verbal behavior and to move toward application of this knowledge to school learning situations and problems. Specifically, the experiments were created to investigate some aspect of the implicit…

One of the most important capacities which children employ when learning language is the capacity to generalize. A child who hears an utterance of a verbal expression while perceiving a particular object (or action, aspect, etc.) becomes normally able to apply the expression not only to this object but also to all those objects which, for him, are…

Semantic elaboration, a language-based mnemonic strategy, was taught to 15 students (aged five to nine years) with moderate learning difficulties over a six-month period, using pictures as stimuli. Among reported results was an improvement in overall performance on memorization of pairs of pictures. Generalization to items not used during teaching…

Three experiments using university students explored what constitutes an event and what determines its boundaries. Results supported the hypothesis that sequences of stimuli repeating in different contexts are cut out to become cognitive entities ("things" with a beginning and an end) in their own right. Results suggest that the…

The pamphlet reviews cognitive and developmental psychology research in which skilled and less skilled performance patterns and mechanisms have been compared. Knowledge has been described, in theory, in terms of an associative network in which concepts are represented as the nodes of the net, and relations between concepts serve as associative…

Three stages of the developing second language of a 3;9-3;11 year-old English-speaking child in an Urdu speech milieu were examined and compared with findings that have been accumulated about the order and process of first language acquisition. The study showed that in the development of many syntactic and morphological features the child used…

Although numerous research studies have shown that viewing educational television results in significant gains in preschool and school-age children's academic knowledge or skills, there is less consistent evidence regarding transfer of learning, the application of knowledge or skills learned in one context to a new problem or situation. This paper…

Describes study that examined the effects of presentation sequence of examples and example difficulty on undergraduate learning with computer-based instruction. Establishing example difficulty according to a generalization formula versus subject matter experts is discussed, and effects on time on task and the number of examples required are…

This study investigated the effects of K. J. Klauer's (1989) inductive reasoning training program of teaching children. Effects of training and the range of transfer of the training were assessed. The subjects were 34 third-grade Dutch children of average ability, matched on age, sex, and IQ. Children from the training condition (N=17) received…