Sixty beginning first-grade students in an urban school district in South Carolina participated in a study investigating the relationship between representational competence and the ability to perform first-grade learning tasks. Representational competence may be defined as the ability to use representations of reality (such as pictures, symbols,…

This study compared the conceptual rule learning performance of normal and learning disabled children. Subjects for the study were 18 normal and 18 learning disabled children with mean ages of 9.4 and 9.3 years and mean IQ scores of 103.1 and 101.6 respectively. The children were matched for age, IQ, sex and race. Four types of rules (affirmation,…

This paper presents a study of the looking and looking away or gaze alternation behavior of both full term and preterm infants in the presence of varying degrees of facial animation. The faces used in the study included, in increasing order of animation, a Raggedy Ann doll's face, a moving and talking doll's face, a mother's less animated face…

Recent research projects demonstrate that pictures in reading textbooks have a negative effect on the word-decoding ability of young readers. This particular study questioned whether the relative difficulty of the words being read determines the effect that pictures have on good, normal, and poor readers. After pretesting to determine reading…

This book explores the many visually oriented activities that can be used to teach the composition process. Chapter one outlines the format of the book and discusses the composition process in terms of visual perception and reaction to visual stimuli. Chapter two introduces the general aspects of composition that are pertinent to all types of…

Based on the author's PhD dissertation, University of Arkansas.

A study examined whether pictures presented in advance of reading a text (advance organizers) as compared to pictures presented after reading a text (postorganizers) would significantly enhance the reader's retention of the text's content. Sixty college students rated their familiarity with six topics, then read materials presented on the three…

Although numerous studies have indicated that older persons process visual information more slowly than younger persons, the precise nature of age-associated changes in the processing of visually presented information remains unclear. Older adults (N=18) and college students (N=18) performed a visual search task in which lists of words and…

In order to determine the effect of certain types of pictures on reading comprehension in beginning French, a study was conducted in which six types of pictorial contexts were used as advanced organizers for a test passage. One group of university students was given a text in French, a second group the same text in English, and a third group a set…

TO COMPARE CONVENTIONAL AND PROGRAMED INSTRUCTION ON TEACHING AUDITORY DISCRIMINATION OF THE "S" PHONEME, 20 LESSONS CONTAINING STIMULUS AND REPEAT ITEMS WERE RECORDED ON A COMMERCIAL MULTI- CHANNEL DEVICE THAT ALLOWS CONTINUOUS ADJUSTMENT ON THE BASIS OF RESPONSE. THE 40 GRADES TWO-FOUR PARTICIPANTS, MATCHED ON AGE, SEX, AND IQ, WERE…

The development and testing of a visual stimulus for writing, to be used in the initial assessment of liberal arts students at the University of Michigan, is described in this paper. The paper first discusses the questions considered by the university committee charged with establishing the assessment process regarding student writers' fluency,…

A previous study by Gibson et al. (1972) that investigated the effect of orthographic structure on letter search was replicated and extended in order to identify factors that might explain the apparent discrepancy between their results and those of comparable studies. Experiment one tested whether the discrepancy might be explained by difference…

Research on learning and conditioning suggests that verbal response modification does not occur in the absence of the subject's ability to define verbally (1) the response-reinforcement relationships and (2) his intention to change his behavior in the direction of reinforcement. This seems to be true for operant conditioning of verbal behavior,…