This study examines the effects of three levels of visual complexity upon the learning of an instructional slide tape program about the functions of a human heart. The three levels of complexity were a simple line drawing in color, an illustration in color, and a realistic color photograph. The effects of visual stimulus complexity upon…

Recently, investigators in behavior and community disciplines have advocated the adoption of positive prevention approaches for life transition problem-solving. Techniques in physiological, cognitive, and behavioral modalities were incorporated into a broad-based intervention program focusing on the acquisition of coping responses to handle life…

Behavioral differences have often been noted between blacks and whites. These differences seem to be associated with the perception and interpretation of the environment and the subsequent selection of the appropriate adapting strategies. This is a socialized difference which is best explained by the concept of psychological differentiation or…

The possible influence of cognitive dissonance in psychotherapy was examined by conceptualizing therapy as an effort justification process. It was predicted that freely choosing to undergo a highly effortful procedure would aid in positive therapeutic change. Subjects (N=52) participated in a weight-reduction experiment in which the degree of…

A study was conducted in light of a neo-Piagetian theory of cognitive development to interpret the effect of priming executive schemes for describing relevant features in a referential communication task. Forty-eight 4-year-old children were divided into primed and nonprimed groups and were asked to describe in isolation a black and white…

People often perform poorly on tasks following experience with unsolvable problems. Two competing explanations for this performance deficit (learned helplessness and egotism) were tested. Subjects were given either solvable or unsolvable discrimination problems and then a series of anagrams which were alleged to be either highly or moderately…

This exploratory study investigated the relationships among three aspects of cognitive style and reading performance on the Gray Oral Reading Test for a sample of 100 fourth graders with IQs in the 85 to 115 range. The results indicated that there was a cognitive shift from reflection-impulsivity to automatization at the fourth-grade level, that…

This study was designed to determine whether instructional treatments specifically designed to match identifiable learner characteristics can produce significantly better learning than mismatched instruction. Instructional treatments for geometry were developed to match learning patterns of individual students, using field-dependence and…

The influence of an individual's cognitive style on hypothesis testing behavior was investigated. Thirty analytic and 30 global subjects each solved 24, 16-trial problems with intermittent reinforcement, i.e., E said "right" or "wrong" after every fifth response. Results indicated that the analytic subjects solved more problems…

Research was conducted to study environmental factors associated with the development of cognitive style in children. The hypothesis was that the parents of field-independent children grant them more autonomy and power than do parents of field-dependent children. The sample consisted of 38 white, middle-class kindergartners, 19 boys and 19 girls,…

An investigation of the relationship of the analytic/non-analytic and the reflective/impulsive cognitive styles of sixth grade students and their use of focusing strategies on a concept attainment task in mathematics was conducted. Fifty-one sixth grade students were identified as reflective or impulsive according to their performance on the…

The inductivist model of language acquisition was tested by comparing the linguistic development of impulsive kindergarten children with that of reflective children, who, in general, make fewer errors on inductive reasoning tasks. The 81 children sampled were tested with the Matching Familiar Figures Test and with measures of syntactic and…

Six sections of a college reading and study skills class were randomly assigned to one of three treatment conditions in a study of the effects of a new teaching-learning strategy, REAP, a procedure for improving reading, writing, and study. One group received instruction and practice in REAP; one, in SQ3R; and one, in the regular study skills…

A self-observation and self-report procedure is proposed that will assist teachers in discovering their students' learning strategies and may generate knowledge about the second language learning process. Transcriptions of segments of interviews with four students illustrate the procedure involved in eliciting student strategies. (Author/RM)

Mean response times and slope of response times were correlated with intelligence and achievement for 94 sixth-graders. Mean response time reliability was greater than that of slope, and correlated significantly with IQ and achievement. Speed of processing information generalized across experimental tasks and reliably indicated intellectual…