This position paper is an extension of a presentation delivered to the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics at their annual meetings in San Diego, 1978. Four limits in test design are discussed: focus on low-level skills, general adherence to randomness, filling in blanks, and right…

Three studies investigating the emergence and early refinement of intelligent self-correction are described. Forty-one children ranging in age from 18 to 30 months served as subjects. Parents taught their children a hide-and-seek game in which the parent hid a toy in natural locations in the home while the child watched. After a 3- or 5-minute…

Four types of sentences differing in grammaticalness and amount of association between component words were presented to 80 educable mentally retarded children for recall after varying delay intervals. The children (all male and between the ages of nine and 14) sat quietly during the delay intervals of named numbers from a memory drum. The results…

This investigation examined in the laboratory the type of learning commonly found in the school situation--the formalized acquisition of concepts. A verbal concept-learning task suitable for college students was devised which permitted the externalizing and quantifying of behavior at 6 points in the learning process. A pilot study evaluated the…

In this study, developmental changes in duration of the icon (visual sensory store) were investigated with three converging tachistoscopic tasks. (1) Stimulus interuption detection (SID), a variation of the two-flash threshold method, was performed by 29 first- and 32 fifth-graders, and 32 undergraduates. Icon duration was estimated by stimulus…

In this paper, Simon describes contemporary information processing approaches to the study of learning and thinking, and discusses the relevance of these studies to the distinction between rote and meaningful learning. Before defining the basic terminology of information processing research, he provides a brief literature review, describing some…

Subjects were given three trials to speak and to write as fast as they could both the alphabet and a set of two-digit numbers. The speed or oral responding was approximately 6 syllables per second for letters and 7 syllables per second for digits. The speed for writing was approximately 2 items per second for both digits and letters. Correlations…

Four experiments were conducted to examine the effects of various processing instructions on the rate of false recognition. The continuous single-item procedure was used, and false recognitions of four types were examined: synonyms, antonyms, nonsemantic associates, and homonyms. The instructions encouraged subjects to think of associates, usages…

This paper describes three studies designed to determine whether there are age-related differences in children's memory for implicit and explicit information in prose. In the first study, six experimental paragraphs were read individually to a total of 60 children in grades K-5. Each child was then asked four verbatim recall questions (specific…

Evaluated with two age groups (mean age 8.1 years or 10.6 years) totaling 22 learning disabled children was whether there is an age related increase in recognition for visual nonverbal short term memory (STM) and the effects on STM of stimulus dimensionality, primacy, recency, and second choice responses. A serial recognition task was used to…

The report describes a number of experiments designed to compare the acquisition of a compensatory tracking skill in adaptively controlled and open loop conditions. It covers one dimensional tracking and two dimensional tracking. Several one dimensional tasks were employed in order to control the degree of subskill interference and memory load.…

The purpose of this study was to determine: (1) the effects of repeating words in compound sentences; and (2) the differences in encoding processes in short term memory for natural language materials compared with nonlinguistic material. A series of give experiments was administered to first graders, college students, and older subjects. The…

The relationship between visual recognition memory and performance on a paired-associate task for good and poor readers was investigated. Subjects were three groups of 21, 21, and 22 children each, with mean IQ's of 98.2, 108.1, and 118.0, respectively. Three experimental tasks, individually administered to each subject, measured visual…

The present study explores accuracy and speed of responses by the five-year-old child to expanded and conjoined sentences. The following factors were considered: (a) number of transformations, (b) types of transformations, (c) auxiliary-type sentence expansion and (d) type of query (those designed to elicit responses which should reflect…

Experiments in the Psychology Department of George Washington University suggest the possibility of constructing sub-languages of English which can accelerate communication. "Quickspeak," a restricted redundancy language, eliminates from natural language those linguistic cues which are reconstructable from those that remain. Principles…