This study was designed to show the effects of three instructional strategies incorporating the use of the cognitive and affective taxonomies on the kinds of questions preservice teachers ask children in reading instruction. The strategies, administered to 120 preservice elementary teachers enrolled in language-arts methods classes, involved 1)…

This book consists of five lectures on communication given at the fifth Nobel Conference. Leroy G. Augenstein explores the positive and negative consequences of man's increasing capacity to manipulate and control the human mind. Peter Marler demonstrates that all the elements necessary for a communication system to qualify as a language exist…

This verbal memory study considers only simple sentences and examines learner performance under the two conditions of audio presentation and printed presentation. Learner performance is compared when required either to recognize sentences identical to those in the original list or, alternatively, to recognize non-identical sentences incorporating…

Cognitive styles--defined as information processing habits--should be considered as a criterion variable in the evaluation of instruction. Research findings identify the characteristics of different cognitive stles. Used in educational practice and evaluation, cognitive styles would be new process variables extending the assessment of mental…

Using Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance as a model, this study attempted to change the attitude and behavior of children toward well liked toys. The results offer only limited support for the theory. The subjects in the three groups did play a significantly different amount of time in the two play periods. The t-tests indicated it was the…

To determine to what extent children of preschool age comprehend the meaning of logical connectives, 64 5- and 6-year-olds were told to hand differently colored and shaped wooden blocks to an experimenter. The commands involved various English idioms used for conjunction (e.g. both black and round), disjunction (either black or round), and…

A task analysis of the conceptual skills prerequisite to learning to read by a phonics-based method is made in an attempt to distinguish these skills from reading's component skills. The model for task analysis presented by Gagne, in which a cumulative learning of prerequisite conceptual skills is assumed, is used. The analysis deals primarily…

Six experiments were conducted to determine whether idea checklists increased idea quantity and quality. College students were allowed 10 or 20 minutes or unlimited time to find ideas for product improvement problems. Results indicated that the only checklist which significantly stimulated productivity was composed of just seven general categories…

Reported is an Aptitude Treatment Instruction (ATI) Study designed to evaluate the aptitude of verbal comprehension in terms of two unitary complex science diagram types: a single complex block word diagram and a single complex picture word diagram.. ATI theory and research indicate that different effective instructional treatments tend to help…

A recent finding that good and poor readers may bring different response patterns to the reading task comes from a pilot study in which so-called good readers achieved a higher score on a comprehension test than did poor readers, even when they had not had a paragraph or story to read as a basis for answering the questions. This study was a more…

To determine the multivariate relationships of measures of convergent thinking, divergent thinking, and self-concept with reading achievement was the purpose of this study. Measures of verbal divergent thinking and self-concept were administered to 188 fourth and sixth grade students from an urban, lower middle class elementary school. Reading…

The primary purpose of this paper was to present the distinction between the actual contributions of Piaget regarding epistemological questions and the manner in which these contributions have been interpreted to provide a basis for current educational curriculum reform. It is the contention of the authors that the Piagetian theory concerning the…

A review is made of that literature which focuses on the relationship of instructional method, internal cognitive activity and performance measures. This includes literature concerned with the issue of "discovery versus reception learning" and the effects of different instructional methods on retention, delayed retention and transfer tasks. The…

A functional (as opposed to structural) theory of intellectual development is presented and used to generate specific performance models for Piagetian tasks involving the control of variables (cf. Inhelder and Piaget, 1958). On the basis of these models, it is concluded that intelligent, field independent 7- and 8-year-olds should be able to…

Second- and fourth-grade children learned two 25-item, paired-associate mixed lists under three experimental conditions: instructed imagery, imposed imagery, and control. Four specific transfer paradigms and a reference paradigm were represented in the lists. The specific transfer paradigms were constructed such that a first list stimulus term (a…