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…

Examines the psychology of learning and its application to work in the laboratory. States that the working memory capacity of students is limited; therefore the amount of information they can process needs to be controlled and "recipe following" in the laboratory is perfectly reasonable. (RT)

Examines the effect of verbalization on the formation and retention of mental images in children in kindergarten, first, and fifth grades. Reports no self-generated verbalization effect with gender or ability level and no retention effect. (Author)

Younger (N=24) and older subjects (N=24) generated one or three properties to set of 40 nouns. Subjects received incidental recall test immediately after, 1 week after, or 3 weeks after generation. Younger subjects recalled more nouns than did older subjects in all conditions, although both age groups exhibited high immediate recall. (Author/ ABL)

Two experiments studied whether 110 first, third, and fifth graders' difficulties in detecting inconsistencies in text were related to their failure to represent inconsistent propositions in memory or failure to compare them although remembered. Shortcomings were related more to difficulties in forming mental representations than in comparing…

Results derived from activities involving 33 children of three years and 32 children of four-and-a-half years indicated no age differences in same day recognition. Findings for recall and retention suggest that age differences for these two memory components are best thought of in terms of the type of memory solicited. (RH)

Old and young adults participated in two experiments involving a standardized, hierarchically organized event. In interviews that assessed memory of the event, older subjects reported fewer event actions than did the young. Memory of old and young was influenced similarly by the hierarchical structure of the event. (RH)

Study of echoic memory interference among students in college introductory Spanish and German courses revealed that students with weaker listening comprehension skills depended more upon vulnerable sensory codes in echoic memory, while students with stronger comprehension relied on stable higher-order codes. (Author/CB)

Two studies on M-capacity found factor-analytical and correlational evidence that five M-capacity tests share a common source of variance and that, as subjects' increase in age, scores increase at a similar rate. Results suggest that, in the 6-11 age range, M-capacity can be measured with a battery of tests. (AA)

Of the 129 women interviewed, a large portion (38%) did not recall abuse reported 17 years earlier. Those who were younger when abuse occurred or were molested by an acquaintance were more likely to have no recall. Implications for research and practice are discussed. Periods with no memory should not suggest abuse never occurred. (52 references)…

Uses the interpretative location of the author's reading of Michael Ondaatje's poem "Light" and the author's writing of his own poem "Three Women Pictured" as a way of organizing a discussion of three ideas that illuminate the complexity of shared reading and response in schools. (TB)

A reading comprehension instructional program designed to improve knowledge and use of the text structure was analyzed in two complementary studies involving 72 high school students. Readers trained in the program demonstrated improved comprehension and were able to transfer their knowledge to other texts. (SLD)

Explores ways people learn from text. Content overlap between a text and the reader's prior knowledge is identified as one factor. Methods are proposed to identify whether a text is suitable for readers with a specific background. The usefulness of coherence gaps that stimulate constructive activities is discussed. (SLD)

Five experiments examined the role of global and local cues in memory retrieval in infancy. Results showed that infants encode and remember for substantial periods of time not only the shape of figures displayed in their periphery but also the global organization of these figures. They also adapt this information when responding to new events.…

Two experiments examined causal links among age, processing time, articulation time, and memory span in elementary school children. Found that age was correlated posssitively with memory span but negatively with processing and articulation times and that age-related change in processing time was associated with a decrease in the time required to…