The present study was designed to explore what subjects can and will do spontaneously in memory retrieval situations. Subjects were kindergarten, third grade and college students. (SB)

Twenty learning disabled (LD) students (9-12 years) with normal verbal IQs performed better on elaborated paired associate learning tasks than 20 LD Ss (10-12 years) with lower verbal IQs. (CL)

The primary purpose for conducting the present experiment was to assess the effects of an associative-attribute--for example, stimulus meaningfulness (m) on the learning rates of different age group children. An attempt was also made to assess the effects of age and m on a measure of subjective organization. This research consisted of two studies:…

The mnemonic consequences of semantic, acoustic, and orthographic encoding and the relationships between encoding and retrieval cues were investigated in an incidental-learning experiment involving 24 first-, third-, and fifth-grade pupils. Each child was asked one orienting question for each of 18 words; the questions differed in the type of…

Children in kindergarten, third grade, and fifth grade were presented a list of either pictures or words (with items presented varying numbers of times on the study trail). In both picture and word conditions, half of the subjects estimated how many times each item had been presented (absolute judgments) and the other half judged which of two…

Eight experiments are described in this report. In experiment 1, four and five year olds were presented four verbal discrimination (VD) lists. For three of the lists all correct items were either conceptually, acoustically, or affectively similar. The fourth was a control list. The conceptual list facilitated VD learning. Experiment 2 indicated…

Ninety children in third and fourth grade were assessed on a hierarchical class inclusion task. Scores were trichotomized, and children from each level were randomly assigned to one of three cueing conditions (no cues, two superordinate cues, six subordinate cues). Subjects were administered a recall task of categorized words and "new" words…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether children as young as second-graders could encode categorically within an abstract evaluative dimension. The study uses mode of stimulus presentation (auditory or visual) as an independent variable. The subjects were 40 white middle class children from grades 2, 4, and 6, who were randomly assigned…

A study examined the ability of 16 children in kindergarten, grade 2, and grade 4 to draw inferences based on the content of a narrative passage and to recognize inferences as derived from, rather than given by, text. An inference task, developed to assess the ability to make and recognize appropriate inferences, consisted of four orally presented…

Prose-learning strategies are classified in this paper as prose-dependent (those that authors can use to optimize communication) or processor-dependent (those that learners can use to optimize reception) and are cross-classified as stage-setting (those that prepare the learner for upcoming prose information) or storage-retrieval oriented (those…

This paper reviews studies on cognitive processes that may mediate the development of early learning problems. Topics covered include auditory and visual discrimination deficits, integration of information from different modalities, the significance of attentional factors, contributions of memory factors, and the importance of cognitive style…

Two studies designed to establish classification procedures and the reliability of a learning strategy screening procedure were conducted, using 184 third and 173 fourth graders from a middle-class suburban school district as subjects. A 10-minute learning strategy screening was administered during which subjects reported which of six generic…

Recall lists were presented to 40 black lower class and 40 white middle class children in this experiment. The purpose of the study was to examine a possible explanation of the relatively poor performance of black and lower class children on tasks requiring abstract learning abilities. It was reasoned that the threshold for the production of…

Sixty-five grade 5-6 children were tested on a verbal recall task involving material of varying semantic and syntactic content. There was no difference between best and poorest readers in their performance on random lists of words, but there were clear differences on meaningful sentences and on syntactically well-formed but semantically anomalous…

Free recall, cued recall, and clustering performance of fourth grade lower socioeconomic black and white children is studied under four conditions of teaching: random presentation, random presentation plus instruction, blocked presentation, and blocked presentation with instruction of categorically related list. Results indicate that both recall…