These experiments focus upon two assumptions of the levels of processing formulation: that context provides exclusive control over the qualitative nature of encoding, and that amount recalled is determined both by cue-trace compatibility and by depth. The results cast doubt upon the validity of each assumption. (Author/MH)

Examines how English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students choose a prompt from several options on a timed-writing exam. Researchers interviewed 26 students after observing them taking a writing exam. Findings indicate that students' background knowledge, question type, and topic specificity influence their decision and that time is not an…

Describes an effort to train parents to respond selectively to miscues and to pay attention to the timing of their responses, to use meaning-focused cues, and to use praise. Concludes that parents can teach and students can learn effective strategies to decrease error rate. (RS)

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)

This article provides recommendations for teaching students how to use a story grammar cuing system to improve both the fluency and quality of their stories. The cuing system is a series of steps in the form of a checklist that serves as a self-regulatory mechanism for prompting attention, memory, and accuracy. (JDD)

A case study of a young Dutch man with intellectual and visual disabilities proved the viability and effectiveness of a self-operated instruction system with verbal cues in achieving independent task performance. The system consisted of a largely modified cassette recording which would stop automatically after each instruction. (Author/CR)

Argues that external cues provide affective information that influence processing strategy and, therefore, examination performance. Notes the differences in performance for two midterm examinations, identical, except that they were printed on blue and red paper. Discusses a method for appropriately adjusting scores to control for form effects.…

A study examined the effects of self-prompted communication book training provided by peers on the conversational initiations of four high school students with extensive support needs. The intervention was associated with increases in participant's appropriate initiations and general education conversational partners' corresponding responses.…

How do children determine the syntactic category of novel words? In this article we present the results of 2 experiments that investigated whether German children between 12 and 16 months of age can use distributional knowledge that determiners precede nouns and subject pronouns precede verbs to syntactically categorize adjacent novel words.…

Over the course of development, the ability to switch between different tasks on the basis of feedback cues increases profoundly, but the role of performance monitoring remains unclear. Heart rate indexes can provide critical information about how individuals monitor feedback cues indicating that performance should be adjusted. In this study,…

Two studies examined the possibility of retrieval-induced forgetting by 7-year-olds. Children heard a story while viewing pictures of events mentioned in the story, each highlighting objects drawn from two distinct semantic categories (e.g. animals and food). Over the next several days, children were asked the same yes/no questions about half the…

This study examined age-related differences in functional learning performance manifested among children, adolescents, and young adults placed in a two-cue ecology involving cues with direct relation and inverse relations with the criterion. On each trial, participants were instructed to consider the values taken by two cues, predict from these…

Although the Minspeak[TM] approach is used on communication devices worldwide, little research has been conducted on its applicability within specific cultural contexts. The impact that users' familiarity of symbols and associations can have on learnability necessitates more systematic research. This study was an investigation into the…

An active learning environment is one in which students are able to "seek" out new experiences, "interpret" them, and "relate" them to previous experiences. This approach allows students to engage in independent thinking, problem solving, and guided discovery as they explore broad movement concepts. An active learning means that students are…

This empirical study examines how English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners use their vocabulary knowledge for inferring meanings of unknown words in reading comprehension. The data, collected through interviews with young adult ESL students in Canadian universities, indicate that: (a) semantic and morphological aspects of vocabulary knowledge…