The major purposes of this study were to determine the effect of a specific cognitive organizer, the Structured Overview (SO), on reading comprehension and to assess the effect of accompanying the overview with a set of directions for its use. One hundred twenty-four undergraduate members of a developmental reading course were randomly assigned to…

The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical tradition which may broaden the scope and perhaps suggest alternate avenues of investigation of the function which we call "memory." As psychology developed during the past century, the area of memory has been strongly influenced on the theoretical level by the thinking of the British…

This report presents data developed for testing the theory that there are social processes which result in differing cognitive styles for subdominant and dominant social groups. The results of surveys of black and white persons in an urban area, of white rural farmers, and Hopi Indians are presented. The research attempts to integrate data and…

The organizational factors in memory relevant to learning medical diagnosis terms are discussed in this paper. Two hypotheses are tested: that the type of list organization will affect total recall; and that the type of curriculum and year in school will affect the organization of recall. Ninety-six second and third year medical students from two…

The question of whether word meanings have internal structure identical in kind to the syntax of sentences is examined. Evidence is sought for the structural aspects of word meaning and the issue of whether judgements of similarity between words is based on meaning content or on meaning structure is raised. Four hypotheses were tested: (1)…

This paper describes and discusses three studies concerned with the representation of children's knowledge as revealed in the ways that children, ages 5 to 17, perform a scientific induction task. A variant of Piaget's balance scale prediction problem was chosen as the experimental task; a formal model for different levels of children's knowledge…

This study was designed to assess whether negative transfer in children's paired-associate learning could be reduced by changing the levels of meaning at which stimuli were encoded on the two lists. It was hypothesized that changes in meaning levels from a first to a second list would result in less interference than conditions where stimuli…

The author reviews the literature and considers clinical implications of three issues in language and cognition: the relationship between language and cognition, the strategies children use in the language-learning task, and the cognitive determinants of what children say. Examined are questions (such as whether cognitive skills are dependent on…

An explanation of the child's mind and his language, stated in terms of the nature of the learner, is presented in this book. The authors ask teachers to think about the competence of the child and try to discover what he must know to be able to read. They ask teachers to examine the nature of the learner--what he knows that enables him to learn…

The six experiments presented in these two manuals were designed for use in any introductory or advanced undergraduate psychology course either partially or totally concerned with human cognition. One manual serves as the teacher's accompaniment to the actual experiments detailed in the student's manual. A list of textbooks which might be…

The authors' investigations of the antecedents and consequences of the empathy response have been guided by a three-component model of empathy. Two of these components are cognitive: the ability to discriminate and label affective states in others, and the ability to assume the perspective and role of another person. Emotional capacity and…

The purpose of this experiment was to analyze developmental differences in rehearsal strategies which may mediate the commonly found age effect on free recall. As expected, significant age differences in recall were found; analysis of rehearsal strategies showed that fifth and eighth graders tended to repeat stimulus words immediately after…

Analysis of the questions asked by normal children suggests that there are cognitive stages of question development. Samples of spontaneous questions asked by normal children and linguistically deviant children were compared in this study in order to determine if linguistically deviant (aphasic) children suffer primarily from a syntactic…

Partial replication of the Luria and Tikhomirov experiments in the verbal regulation of behavior has led to results and conclusions contradictory to those of the Russian researchers. Subjects for these experiments included mentally handicapped children and adults. The results of four sets of experiments are presented. In general, the basic…

One hundred and sixty first grade boys and girls of normal intelligence were tested for ability to conserve multiple space relations. The criterion task apparatus was a wooden T with a model of schoolhouse attached and centered above the point of contact of the horizontal and vertical axis. The T had a track running the length of both its axes…