The authors examined the accuracy of information elicited from seventy-nine 5- to 7-year-old children about a staged event that included physical contact-touching. Four to six weeks later, children's recall for the event was assessed using an interview protocol analogous to those used in forensic investigations with children. Following the…

Three-step prompting is a procedure commonly used in behavioral assessments and interventions; however, little research has evaluated the effects of this procedure on increasing children's compliance with caregiver requests. In this study, caregivers of children who demonstrated low levels of compliance were trained to use three-step prompting…

Applied behavior analysis (ABA) has emerged as one of the most effective empirically based strategies for instructing individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Four ABA-based strategies that have been found effective are video modeling, visual strategies, social script fading, and task analysis. Individuals with ASD often struggle with…

Despite a growing development of virtual laboratories which use the advantages of multimedia and Internet for distance education, learning by means of such tutorial tools would be more effective if they were specifically tailored to each student needs. The virtual teaching process would be well adapted if an artificial tutor can identify the…

Criteria for the design and selection of literacy and thinking tools that allow educators to justify what they do are described within a wider framework of learning theory and research into best practice. Based on a meta-analysis of best practice, results from a three year project designed to evaluate the effectiveness of a secondary school…

The study explored methods and techniques for training mentally retarded adults to perform gardening tasks. A total of 31 subjects ages 21 to 48 (IQ range 32-89) participated in the study, which consisted of three phases. In an initial pilot study, experimentation without subjects resulted in the development of modified tools (e.g., notched…

This paper presents a theory of instructional text design that takes into account the process of reading comprehension and the variables in both the reader and the text which can affect that process. Three areas of design concern--legibility and readability, visual illustration, and structure and organization--are discussed. Each area design…

The purpose of the eight studies reported in this paper was two-fold: to identify some of the relationships that exist between the unique properties of diagrams and various aspects of cognitive processes and learning, and, subsequently, to derive principles from these relationships that would direct the design and use of diagrams in the classroom.…

A six year old female tutor was trained to facilitate social conversation between two male age mates (selected for their infrequent level of social interactions) during daily play sessions. Tutoring of peer initiations occurred in a small room adjacent to the main classroom. The peers were tutored to request information (RI) and request behavior…

The purpose of this research project was to evaluate the effects of prompts and cues in paired-associate learning. Experiment One was to investigate the effects of cues and prompting on the learning of Japanese vocabulary. Experiment Two duplicated the above using digit-nonsense syllable combinations as the paired associates. The next three…

The purposes of this study were to replicate and extend the list learning results in a prose context, and to explore both the learning of incidental material and the effect of a text organization pretest and posttest information about passage structure. One hundred twenty-eight college undergraduates read a 460 word prose story, which mentioned…

The purpose of this study was to determine effects of various prompting procedures in teaching children a sight vocabulary. The five words which comprised the sight vocabulary were presented to 96 five-year-olds in nursery and elementary schools. During initial training, integrated stimuli and non-integrated stimuli differed with respect to the…

Three experiments were performed to extend the research using the Subject Matter Trainer (SMT), an early teaching machine. Various training modes were compared. In all three experiments, the subject's task was to learn adjective pairs. Experiment I used the anticipation method. A test slide was shown first with an adjective singled out at the top…