For several decades, brainstorming in groups and its variants have been widely examined in research as a technique to produce ideas. The way to stimulate elaboration by linking ideas to those previously given by others during a brainstorming session is a challenge for researchers and practitioners aiming to go beyond idea generation. Despite…

This study compared the effectiveness of two encoding strategies (peg system vs. conceptual understanding) on serial learning. Sixty Chinese 5th graders from a primary school in Hong Kong participated in training on the two strategies in two consecutive weeks. While half of the students learned peg system in the first week and conceptual…

An incoherent visualization is when aspects of different senses of a word (e.g., the biological "mouse" vs. the computer "mouse") are present in the same visualization (e.g., a visualization of a biological mouse in the same image with a computer tower). We describe and implement a new model of creating contextual coherence in…

The ability of 4th, 6th, and 8th graders to use structures inherent in a list of permuted symbols, defined in terms of Piagetian theory, was investigated. Age differences were noted. Results supported the theoretical notion that environmental event structure facilitates learning. (ST)

To study the effects of planned seriation experiences on the acquisition and retention of seriation abilities of four-year-old children, fifty children from four preschool centers were assigned to control and experimental groups and tested before and after exposure to the experiences. Data analysis indicated that the experimental group had higher…

One of the most typical ways in which people learn is by inferring general rules from examples. In recent years, significant progress has been made toward understanding how learning from examples can occur, determining when it does occur, and identifying conditions that promote it. This paper reviews these results and then suggests a program of…

This study examined the relative influence of observation, feedback in training seriation, and imitative motor activity in facilitating conceptual development. (CM)

This study has demonstrated the feasibility of extracting from passages of expository text a structure that reveals an important aspect of the logical interrelations among the ideas expressed in the passage. (Author)

In this article, I argue for a renewed focus in mathematics education research on procedural knowledge. I make three main points: (1) The development of students' procedural knowledge has not received a great deal of attention in recent research; (2) one possible explanation for this deficiency is that current characterizations of conceptual and…

In the first of three studies, separately reported, the effects of prompting and sequencing on a science concept task were studied with college students. The data analysis showed that the prompting procedure was significantly different from a no-prompting condition; prompting seemed to negate the affect of the defined concept instructional…

A study was devised to investigate the effects of sequence of concept presentation and practice in a concept learning task. Learners were presented with either one conjunctive concept at a time, or with multiple concepts all related to the same principle. Practice was sequenced in four positions: before concept presentation, after concept…

As predicted, foods from categories typical of most people's restaurant schemata (conceptual framework) were better recalled by undergraduates who read a restaurant narrative, than those reading about supermarkets, a less structured schemata. Findings confirm Ausubel's notion that information which fits slots in a conceptual framework is more…

Studies concerned with the synchronous emergence prediction of Piaget's structures-of-the-whole principle are discussed in conjunction with three groups of concrete-operational skills: (1) transitivity/conservation/class inclusion; (2) double classification/double seriation; and (3) ordinal, cardinal, and natural number concepts. Findings show…