Two experiments, each with 132 undergraduates, evaluated the effects of definition adjunct questions on concept learning. In both experiments, only unmatched application adjunct questions preceded by a definition question produced higher performance on criterion questions than did definition questions only. The effective use of definition…

The number of facts college students correctly recalled was not affected by whether they were provided goals which did or did not encourage them to reorganize the passage material they studied. (Author/BW)

Students in 22 social science courses at the junior high, senior high, and college level were surveyed about their study habits to prepare for a major exam. An index of the effectiveness of each class of study activity was developed in terms of its impact on test grades. (RB)

Two experiments, involving 195 undergraduates, investigated how different note-taking formats influenced student note taking. Results reconfirmed that a flexible outline framework in which the order of subtopics corresponds to the order of lecture presentation produces more note taking than a collapsed matrix framework presenting fewer subtopics.…

Contends that academic achievement cannot be improved by increasing the amount of time students spend on homework. Instead, achievement depends on the nature of the study activities students do. (RB)

Seventy-four introductory psychology students were subjects in a study evaluating the impact of cooperative interactions during studying and test taking. Results indicated that cooperative study training affects performance favorably. Cooperative test-taking training also affected recall performance favorably, for the amount of information…

Across 4 experiments, 121 college students and 80 Spanish-English bilingual members of the university community read narrative or expository texts and answered comprehension questions. Manipulating intervals between readings, language, and the activity between the readings indicates that all these variables influence whether a repeated reading…

The research literature indicates that recording notes is less crucial than students' review of notes for performance on a variety of learning tasks. Future research on notetaking should include factors such as length of presentation, interest in material, format of information delivery, and student use of notes. (Author/RD)

While reading a passage, college students expecting an essay examination took notes on sentences of higher structural importance than those anticipating a multiple choice test. Note taking seemed to serve as both an encoding device and as an external storage mechanism, with the latter being the more important function. (Author/BW)

Four levels of notetaking (summary, paraphrase, verbatim, and letter search) were used to control depth of processing of a prose passage with high school students, who then either reviewed their notes or read an interpolated text. Results favored groups with deeper levels of processing on two post-tests. (Author/RD)

The effect of test expectancy on preferred strategy use and test performance on factual and higher-level questions in learning from expository text was studied, using 42 undergraduates who reported their study strategies and completed a multiple-choice test. Test expectancy affected neither preferred strategy use nor test performance. (SLD)

High-level behavioral objectives did not produce greater learning than low-level, contrary to previous findings using study questions interspersed through written prose. Overt use of objectives at both levels produced greater learning, supporting the idea that procedures requiring semantic encoding are instructionally superior to those requiring…

A theoretical base is proposed for the current empirical literature on study skills. The proposed compensation model emphasizes the function of study activities as a subclass of cognitive skills aimed at cognitive control that compensates for limitations of the information processing system. A factor analysis confirms five basic structures. (SLD)

The roles that knowledge, motivational variables, and approaches to study play in academic success were explored for 104 undergraduates. A path model was proposed and tested, providing a basis for beginning to understand how the approaches to study students select may mediate between knowledge, beliefs, and achievement. (SLD)

Four experiments with 132 seventh graders, 162 eighth graders, 75 fourth graders, and 52 third graders compared the mnemonic keyword method with various other vocabulary learning strategies. Mnemonic keyword students outperformed sentence-context and free-study counterparts and generally outperformed others on tests of vocabulary usage. (SLD)