When students ask for a study advice, many professors would say something like this: "Read carefully. Write down unfamiliar terms and look up their meanings. Make an outline. Reread each chapter." That's not terrible advice. Some scientists would say that professors left out the most important step: "Put the book aside and hide the notes. Then…

In two experiments, undergraduates did/did not create a maplike representation while learning a passage, and were either forced to study the map, instructed to study, or given no map prior to reading. Free-recall data showed that forced map study benefited learners with low vocabulary scores. (Author/GK)

A series of papers will be written to review in a comprehensive fashion the literature related to 3 categories of variables in concept learning: task variables, stimulus variables, and learner variables. This paper, the first of the series, focuses on task variables. Research dealing with instructions, temporal factors, and feedback is critically…

One hundred-fifty subjects studied a passage with questions interspersed at different locations. Total level of acquisition was highest in treatments involving postquestions and no questions. The results were attributed to the influence of adjunct questions on learner expectations that affect the selective processing of information. (Author/JAC)

Four separate experiments were completed using the same stimulus materials but different groups of subjects to determine if orienting tasks created problems of control in incidental/intentional learning studies. Subjects were all Caucasians and heterogeneous in age (from 24 to 64 years), educational experiences, and career choices. Those in the…

Three studies investigated goal expectancy as a variable in teaching-learning situations. The first study looked at the effect of the student's expectancy of the type of test to be given on their ability to recall word lists. There was a strong type-of-test expectancy effect in that those persons expecting to recall words in any sequence actually…

Recent findings [Turcotte, Gagnon, & Poirier, 2005. The effect of old age on the learning of supra-span sequences. "Psychology and Aging," 20, 251-260.] indicate that incidental learning of visuo-spatial supra-span sequences through immediate serial recall declines with old age (Hebb's paradigm). In this study, we examined whether…

Adjunct questions are test-like items interspersed at regular intervals, preceding or following prose passages, with the intention of increasing subsequent learning. In this state-of-the-art review, studies which include three major variables--age, ability, and question complexity level--are examined to determine whether a particular combination…

Describes a class activity that familiarizes students with the major steps of the research process and guides their further organization and comprehension of course material. Students are asked to list the major steps involved in working on a research problem. These lists are compared to those of expert researchers. (MJP)