This study attempted to discover the relative contribution to spelling achievement (the dependent variable) of each of the following independent variables: intelligence, visual memory, auditory memory, structural analysis, phonetic analysis, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. Participating in the study were 190 students from six seventh-grade…

This study explored the developmental changes in children's effective utilization of verbal versus pictorial stimuli in forming connections between stimulus and response elements in a paired-associate task. A total of 112 children (56 males and 56 females), half of them 4-year-olds and half 8-year-olds, were tested under eight conditions involving…

This book is a collection of the papers presented at the fifth International Interdisciplinary Conference on Piagetian Theory and the Helping Professions, held at the University of Southern California on January 24, 1975. The conference was sponsored by University Affiliated Program at Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles; 44 papers are included.…

This paper reports an attempt to replicate previously published findings on the interrelationship between free-recall performance and selected cognitive abilities. In Experiment I, 300 7th and 12th graders responded to a battery of eight intelligence and memory tests and were then randomly assigned to one of three pre-learning instructional…

The role of inference in children's comprehension and memory is the subject of this research report. An underlying proposition is that in order for a child to effectively understand and remember linguistic or nonlinguistic information, he must actively embellish the given stimulus material with his own implicit knowledge. In the experiment…

The extent to which children of two age levels use visual or name codes in recognizing similarities and differences between short words was studied. Subjects were presented with a word for .5, 1.0, or 1.5 seconds, followed immediately by a second word, and were instructed to press a key indicating whether or not the two words had the same name.…

Two experiments were conducted, the purpose of which was to investigate the direct effects of questioning. In experiment one, 240 sophomores, juniors, and seniors from a small town high school read one of two versions of a 550-word passage describing the social behavior of the army ant. The subjects then took either a verbatim or paraphrase quiz,…

Research investigated three topics. These were: 1) the effect of paragraph organization on free recall of sentences and on the selection of clustering strategies; 2) how persons differing in subjective organization differ on recall and strategy selection; and 3) the relation between subjective organization and other cognitive abilities. Three…

Paired-associate (PA) learning of children was investigated as a function of age, stimulus-type, and mode of elaboration. Sixty nursery school children (average age 53 months) and 60 first graders (average age 84 months) were selected as subjects. Each child studied nine pairs of objects, photographs, or drawings for two trials of PA learning by…

The purposes of this study were to replicate the effects of question placement, either before or after, on the acquisition of critical and incidental material with grade school subjects and to determine the effects of paragraph length on learning with children. Two variables, question placement (BA) and pacing (PL), were combined in a 2 x 4…

A method is proposed in which nondefined Chinese characters may be uniquely classified thus making them compatible for machine translation. An optical-digital device is used to locate nondefined geometric shapes within Chinese characters via spatial filtering techniques and cyclic cross-correlation. Seventeen nondefined geometric shapes are found…

The extent to which pictorial presentation would facilitate the comprehension of text-like passages among two populations of fourth-grade students was investigated. Subjects were 64 students each in high-socioeconomic status (SES) white and low-SES black groups. Simple passages amenable to pictorial presentation were read over a programed tape to…

Despite its title, this is not a book on rhetoric in any narrow sense, but rather concerns its general ambience and also some of its quite specific manifestations. The 13 studies that comprise the book move chronologically from the Renaissance up to the present time. Chapter 2 shows the continuity of verbal expression during the English…

The purpose of this study was to attempt to determine if score gains obtained upon repeated testing with an intelligence test result from a practice effect, from students remembering specific items, or from a combination of both. The verbal and nonverbal batteries of an I.Q. test were administered to 860 sixth graders on three occasions with…

A series of pilot and regular experiments were conducted to investigate memory checking processes. The first set of experiments developed a set of six different tests for the measurement of memory checking. Correlational studies of these tests demonstrated that they could be used reliably and that the different tests are measuring the same basic…