Awareness of the presence of sexual double entendres within a word association test was investigated with measures of response time, verbal content of responses, and videotaped facial expressions. Subjects characterized as internal-field independent were found to become aware earlier in the task, to test out their developing hypothesis about the…

An internal/external efficiency evaluation on the economic implications of mastery learning is presented. Two important aspects of mastery learning are: (1) its intrinsic worth regardless of economic benefits, and (2) the necessary changes in the social and economic structure that will make the mastery learning approach increasingly functional. It…

This paper discusses two aspects of reading as a cognitive process as they relate to instruction based on the intellectual operation performed during the act of reading. The first consideration is an assumption that comprehension skills are based on a set of underlying cognitive tasks or operations which can be developed through instruction. The…

The review summarizes empirical findings and theoretical views related to the Stroop color-word phenomenon, in which naming of a color is disrupted and delayed by the presence of an "irrelevant" word denoting a color different from the color patch. It was deemed important to increase awareness of this phenomenon, since it involves basic…

This study is an attempt to identify one source of individual differences in the extent to which readers learn from text and the means for accommodating it. Eighty college students were administered a series of aptitude tests and randomly assigned to one of four treatment groups. The subjects then received six passages, each passage followed by a…

This study was designed to examine the effectiveness of social reinforcement as a function of familiarity with the adult agent administering the reinforcers. First and fifth grade children were tested in a marble dropping task on two successive days. On the second day half of the children at each grade level were tested by the same experimenter…

The author reviews and evaluates the principal theoretical measures of attention categorized in three areas: self-report measures, operant behavioral measures, and psychophysiological measures. Self-report measures include a variety of rating scales, interest and attitude scales, Krugman's "number of 'connections,'" and program audience analyzers.…

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility of applying research variables for concept acquisition into a generalized instructional model for teaching concepts. This paper does not present the methodology for the decision/selection stages in designing the actual instruction task, but offers references to other sources which give…

A study of the speech process was conducted. The process is described as one closely linked to the one involved in the problem of the serial order in behavior. It is pointed out that in the speech of young children the grammatical relations that are properties of elementary underlying sentences appear in the grammatical meanings. Six examples of…

The author reviews findings in perception, cognition, psycholinguistics, and motivation, concentrating on the development of these processes in the nonreading and beginning reading child rather than in the mature processes of a skilled reader. She offers the following conclusions: (1) Research in perception suggests that there are developmental…

This study attempted to answer the following three questions: 1) Do students of grades four through seven perform equally well on both syncretistic understanding and logical thinking? 2) Do boys perform as well as girls on these two types of thinking? 3) Do students whose parents have a higher educational level perform as well as students whose…

Prompted by Piaget's suggestion that there might be qualitative differences in the thinking processes of children who read well as compared with those who read poorly, this study investigated the mental operations of multiple classification and class inclusion as possible characteristics required for a child to abstract and modify efficient…

Linguistic and psychological factors which bear on the concept of "intuitive thinking" are analyzed with respect to second language learning. Analytical thinking is considered as being logical, cognitive, and objective while intuitive thinking is considered to be creative, constructive, and non-analytical. Following a brief discussion of Piaget's…

The purpose of this research was to explore the development of, and relationships among, individual modes of (1) articulating knowledge about and evaluation of peers; (2) attributing causality for interpersonal events to the self and to others; (3) attributing one's own and other's behavior to intentionality or accident. Data was collected for…

The preliterate child must acquire from reading instruction at least the following skills: (a) appropriate scanning behavior, (b) letter and word recognition, (c) letter-sound generalizations, and (d) comprehension of written materials, at least to the degree that the reader can comprehend the same message when received aurally. Almost all modern…