A study investigated whether metaphors help or hinder prose comprehension. The subjects, 71 college students, read eight short stories and rated their quality and the effectiveness of the writing. Approximately half of the subjects received stories that contained metaphors, while half received the same stories in which the metaphors had been…

To aid instructors in teaching their students to use effective methods of memorization, this article outlines major memory methods, provides examples of their use, evaluates the methods, and discusses ways students can be taught to apply them. First, common, but less effective, memory methods are presented, including reading and re-reading…

This report is based on interviews with a group of elementary school children about how they answered the items in an achievement test administered 12 months after a 7-week instructional unit. Data from the interviews are related to data from further pretests and posttests and from detailed observations and recordings of the original instructional…

Goodenough's (1976) findings on field dependence/independence are extended here by focusing on the information processing stages of attention, encoding in short term and working memories, and storage and retrieval processes of long term memory. The reviewed research indicates that field independent and dependent individuals differ in the ability…

People daydream, plan, and anticipate. They think frequently about their own actual or potential behaviors, and create behavioral scenarios (or scripts) in which they are the main character. To investigate the relationship between thinking about a behavior and one's expectancies or intentions to perform that behavior, subjects (N=93) in Experiment…

A two-phase study about skilled memory as it is used by waitresses included a participant-observer phase and an observational phase. Participants were three experienced waitresses who had worked at a midtown Manhattan restaurant for 14, 7, and 3 years respectively and a team of 5 confederate customers. Waitresses and customers wore microphones.…

An overview of theory and research in memory as it relates to developmental differences is offered in this paper, which is intended to provide background information for the staff of the Skills Essential to Learning Television Project (a multi-level series of video and print resources for classroom use). A model for viewing information processing…

Popular and applied business literature related to self-improvement is reviewed in this working paper, one of eight which provide background information for the staff of the Skills Essential to Learning Television Project (a multi-level series of video and print resources for classroom use). A review of theories of time management in section I…

The influence of negative affect on the retrieval of information from memory during infancy was investigated in two studies through the use of an operant conditioning paradigm. The procedure used, known as "mobile conjugate reinforcement," involves a free operant task in which an infant is reinforced for footkicking by the movement of an…

Reasoning and logical thinking can be defined and explained from different perspectives. Three approaches are reviewed in this report; they are: (1) the logical structure approach; (2) the Piagetian approach of developmental stages; and (3) the information processing or memory approach. Four hypotheses related to these approaches were investigated…

The study attempted to further clarify the relationship between speed and memory span by directly examining whether slower identification of item information is the source of span difficulties in learning disabled (LD) children. Forty-eight sixth grade boys participated in the study, 24 LD and 24 non-LD. The method involved pretesting each subject…

Two experiments investigated relationships between state anxiety, memory processes, and children's performance on problem-solving tasks. Participants were second and sixth graders in a private elementary school in Redlands, California. In both experiments, subjects responded to three training and eight test problems presented in the introtact…

Reported are some investigations of the use of discovery learning techniques on retention. (PEB)

The test group was composed of thirty 8-to 12-year-old males. (CH)

Thirty-six newborn infants were exposed to a visual stimulus until habituation was demonstrated; subjects were then presented with the same target or one of either moderate or large discrepancy from the standard stimulus. Following habituation, female infants displayed greater recovery of attention to moderate stimulus change. (SDH)