Instructive feedback (IF) is a teaching strategy where extra information, or secondary targets, are presented in the consequence portion of an instructional interaction. Unlike teaching primary targets, no response is required from the learner after presentation. In the current investigation, the procedures from Tullis et al. (2017, "The…

Two experiments examined the relative effects of concrete and abstract advance organizers on students' memory for subsequent prose. Results of the experiments are discussed in terms of the memorability, familiarity, and visualizability of concrete and abstract verbal materials. (JD)

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)

Evaluated contributions of age, presentation modality, task demand, and content structure to prose recall variation among adults. Tested 60 young and 60 older adults for recall of ideas in 641-word prose passage. Found recall for total number of idea units was significantly lower for older participants and for auditory presentation across both age…

Assessed were the effects of verbal placeholding and full verbal rehearsal (verbalizing aloud the critical components and sequence) on the direction following behavior of 14 institutionalized retarded adolescents (mean IQ 48). A control group from the same institution participated in practice sessions without the verbal rehearsal stress. Pre- and…

Results indicated that discovery subjects took significantly longer than verbal reception subjects in the first-, third-, and sixth-grades to reach the original learning criterion. Verbal reception subjects generally demonstrated performance which was superior to discovery subjects on all measures of retention and transfer. (Author/BJG)

The purpose of this study was threefold: to determine whether adding a mnemonic to systematically designed instruction would improve verbal retention, to establish whether retention is better for concrete or abstract information, and to determine whether mental imagery or verbal elaboration is more effective for learning concrete or abstract…

Three treatments based on the model of memory proposed by R.M. Gagne and R.T. White were compared in their effects on eighth- and ninth-graders' learning and retention of geographical facts and skills. The first treatment had an active excursion, the second had a passive excursion, and the third had no excursion. (Author/PN)

The effect of presentation time on learning under varying mediation instructions demonstrated a time-dependent difference in the facilitating effect of imagery generation or sentence generation instructions. Subjects were junior high school students working in a paired associate task with concrete nouns. Both cognitive strategies were more…

Two introductory passages, one regular passage, and one experimental advance organizer passage developed to facilitate initial learning were assigned to normal and retarded children. The subjects were 184 normal 8-year-olds (controls' mean IQ 118.00, organizers' 118.80) and 184 educable mentally retarded 15-year-olds (EMR controls' mean IQ 74.85,…