The effectiveness of D. Ausubel's Advance Organizer, an introduction presented before the material to be taught, was tested with 96 mildly retarded adolescents. Results of a three-way analysis of variance indicated a facilitative effect under the written presentation, especially for high-level questions and a negative effect under the oral…

Reports an experiment which supports the predictions of the accommodative-reconstruction hypothesis that recall is not based on retrieval of stored traces of interpreted experience. It involves accommodating details of what is to be remembered to what is known at the time of recall. (PMJ)

The degree to which cognitive mediation interacts with vocabulary ability to influence the recall of different verbal units was investigated with a sample of 64 elementary school children. Results are interpreted with respect to the influence of vocabulary ability on school learning. (Author/JKS)

Two experiments investigated the relationship of verification to the answering of yes-no questions. Subjects verified simple statements or answered simple questions. Various proposals concerning the relative difficulty of answering questions and verifying statements were considered, and a model was proposed. (SW)

Endpoint and distance effects have been observed in the protocols of subjects learning linear orderings. These were produced by subjects learning the frequency of word occurrence as the greater member of a relationship. Error patterns were similar on all trials. (CHK)

Confirms the hypothesis that meaningful verbal instruction will be most efficient when it proceeds from the general to the specific, from the superordinate to the subordinate. (RB)

This study investigated verbal learning when separate tasks were presented simultaneously, with variations in the number of tasks specified to be learned and in the number of tasks presented. Results indicated that the effect of certain independent variables was similar to the effect found when tasks were learned singly. The spacing effect, for…

The role of imagery is assessed in verbal concept identification and evidence is found that some concepts can be coded as images. (Author/AM)

This book is an introduction to the psychological study of basic learning processes in children. Written for students who are not majors in psychology and who do not have much familiarity with the technical vocabulary of psychology, it has two themes: even the most basic kinds of learning are included by cognitive processes or mental activities;…

Examined were the effects of verbal labels alone and in combination with two types of instruction on the concept attainment of 80 educable mentally retarded and 80 normal boys of school age matched for mental age. For learning the concept "equilateral triangle" Ss were randomly assigned to one of four experimental treatment conditions: verbal…

The purpose of this study was to determine if being next-in-line to perform would render strong effects on the student's storage and retrieval of information. The subjects were 45 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory educational psychology course. Fifteen subjects were arranged in a large circle and were told that they were going to…

This research project investigated some of the characteristics of primary and secondary memory. In the primary research, subjects were given a list of words followed by an interpolated task. The data of interest were the recall for terminal items in the list. Using this procedure, the researchers have demonstrated negative recency in initial…

This paper, presented at the 1973 meeting of the American Education Research Association, discusses some of the studies conducted in the area of learning from prose. The first study dealt with pooling independent sentences into groups of related sentences and preparing passages by stringing these sentences together. College students then read one…

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF A TYPICAL METHOD OF ORGANIZING TECHNICAL INFORMATION SHEETS USED BY VOCATIONAL EDUCATORS TO PROVIDE UP-TO-DATE INSTRUCTION TO STUDENTS WAS COMPARED TO THAT OF TWO NEWLY DEVELOPED ORGANIZATIONS BASED ON "THE SUBSUMPTION THEORY OF MEANINGFUL VERBAL LEARNING AND RETENTION" (AUSUBEL, 1962). AN OPERATIONAL DEFINITION…