A study was undertaken to test the assumption that students will interact with illustrations in textbooks, workbooks, and programed units; and that this interaction will facilitate learning. Eight test groups were compared with a group that had only verbal symbols to learn from. These groups had, in addition to the verbal descriptions, the black…

A self-renewing college is sensitive to the changing needs of each learner, its goals meet the learning expectations of students, its teachers translate these expectations into measurable teaching objectives, and it constantly revitalizes education. Present faults of general education include fragmented curricula, teacher orientation to national…

This paper attempts to organize, systematize, elaborate, and elucidate a number of basic principles for behavioral change that have experimental foundation. The two major areas discussed concern procedures and principles for strengthening and weakening behavior. Matters of inducing behavior are considered. Principles for strengthening behavior are…

An attempt was made to reduce or eliminate rule effects in attribute identification (AI) tasks through AI pretraining. Thirty-six 12th-grade volunteers received 0, 4, or 8 AI problems prior to transfer to a final AI task. Results showed that even at the highest level of pretraining, rule effects were present at transfer. These findings were…

The relationship between learning ability and intelligence has continually been a focus of theory and research. It is argued in this paper that the inconclusive results of studies relating individual differences variables such as intellectual abilities to learning are due to a too pragmatic, theoretical orientation. Theoretical models explicating…

The purpose of this study was to gather evidence relative to the proposition that matching (recognition) performance for A-B pairs following an unlearning paradigm cannot be used to infer associative loss. The alternative was to assume that matching performance is based on frequency information which is independent of associative information. The…

Three different strategies of choosing items for presentation in a simple list learning situation are compared. The instructional task was to teach the correct response to a number of stimulus items, using a paired-associate teaching procedure. Only one item could be presented on a given trial and the total number of trials was limited. The…

Recent theories of concept identification have dealt largely with two-category problems in which the correct classification of a stimulus depends on values of a single binary-valued dimension. Such concept identification problems can be solved by a single trial. Two or more dimensional problems would seem to require more complex methods of…

Twelve children (mean age = 2 1/2 yrs.) were instructed in a group setting to follow a number of different requests by a teacher. In Experiment I, the group's instruction following behavior remained low regardless of whether (1) the teacher provided either modeling or verbal cues or a combination of these two and (2) another adult did or did not…

The purpose of this experiment was to determine whether a constant information processing rate would occur when subjects in verbal discrimination (VD) learning were presented a mixture of items of different lengths. Forty-two Naval Postgraduate School students served in a VD experiment with a random mixture of two-, three-, and four-word items at…

The construction and validation of a learning hierarchy designed to assist instruction in the skills of science hypothesis formation and testing are described. Results of the validation using prospective elementary teachers are described, and the revised hierarchy is presented. Revalidation results for a different group of teacher trainees are…

The purpose was to determine whether children in classrooms would manifest cognitive behavior described by Piaget for their developmental stage. First, fourth, and eighth grade classes were selected as representative of Piaget's preoperational, concrete, and formal stages respectively. Twelve classes at each grade level (six social studies and six…

This series of four studies investigated the abilities of children in grades five through eight to perform on a reasoning test written in both Ikonic and Symbolic form. An abstract reasoning test which had been shown to be highly correlated with success in mathematics was rewritten into Ikonic form. Children whose ages bridge the gap between the…

This dictionary of Piaget terms is devoted solely to the vocabulary of the most important terms found in the writings of Piaget and his collaborators. The definition of each term is illustrated in at least one context, and on several occasions the original text is cited. (WR)

Three papers are presented and each is followed by two reactions. The first paper presents methods of dealing with questions about the conduct of scientific theorizing. The theory-models approach is explained as a mode for conducting part of the theory construction tasks required in the complete act of scientific inquiry. In the second paper a…