The relationship of aptitude, strategy, and cognitive task performance is explored through the use of mathematical models of performance time. Models of strategy and strategy-shifting on a spatial visualization task were tested individually for 30 male high school and college subjects. For each of three successive task steps (encoding,…

The ability to comprehend the gist and the main ideas of a passage are important textbook reading skills. Since research into children's ability to extract the central thoughts from prose has produced mixed findings, a study was undertaken to determine how skillful children are at comprehending the gist and the main ideas of a passage. To insure…

Problem solving approaches often find a path from the givens to the unknown or from the unknown to the givens. This study explores those approaches using written protocols of Navy subjects while solving for the numerical value of an unknown from several knowns and a system of equations. For a subset of the items, solutions require subjects to…

Marginal and other intratext notations (gloss) can be used as an instructional technique to direct readers' active attention to (1) places in text where the application of specific skills would be appropriate (either for teaching or for encouraging the application of specific skills), (2) instances where a particular strategy could be useful for…

A study analyzed the cohesive elements found within a text and the difficulty of their resolution within a particular text structure. The specific cohesive form used was pronominal reference. Each of forty-four students in grades ten through twelve was asked to read, sentence by sentence, a text which contained pronouns and pronoun referents. They…

Reported is a study of two instructional strategies: (1) the placement of key questions in text materials, and (2) the use of prescriptive feedback to direct students who missed text questions to appropriate remedial work. Learning that resulted from these two techniques was examined relative to achievement, time-on-task, and efficiency.…

Cognitive psychology has provided an information processing model that distinguishes between input processes such as listening to speech or reading and output processes such as speaking or writing. It is useful for spelling reformers to consider reading (input) and writing (output) processes separately, because the demands of the reader and of the…

This paper summarizes the indicators of extraordinary ability in young people; selects for more careful scrutiny some characteristics of the talented and gifted that would influence the content, sequence, and methods of sex education; and suggests the broad outlines of a differential curriculum of sex education. Data documenting advanced physical,…

Thirty college undergraduates participated in a study of the effects of acoustic and visual interference on the recall of word and picture triads in both short-term and long-term memory. The subjects were presented 24 triads of monosyllabic nouns representing all of the possible combinations of presentation types: pictures, printed words, and…

Twenty college students, ten each in the experimental and control groups, were the subjects of an experiment designed to demonstrate that integration of verb meanings occurs in connected discourse. Six paragraph-length stories, each of which included one or two critical sentences containing a general verb, were presented orally to the subjects.…

In learning to read, children must first understand the objectives of that skill: that the visible symbols communicate meaning and code certain features of speech. If a child does not understand this, learning will be impaired. For instance, children who are taught to read a language other than their native language learn better if instructions…

The learning machine described in this paper acquires concepts representable as conjunctive forms of the predicate calculus and behaviors representable as productions (antecedent-consequent pairs of such conjunctive forms): these concepts and behavior rules are inferred from sequentially presented pairs of examples by an algorithm that is probably…

Two hundred sixty-five subjects learned a mixed list of paired associates in an AB, AD and AB, CD transfer paradigm. Two levels of semantic processing were factorially varied across original and interpolated pairs. Recall of original pairs was shown to be directly related to the processing depth of original pairs in both paradigms and inversely…

A preliminary study was conducted to identify the precipitating conditions and strategies used for vocabulary acquisition and to relate these findings to one theory of elementary and post-elementary cognitive development. Twenty-six college seniors were asked three questions regarding precipitating conditions and strategies used for vocabulary…

In addition to the important role of memory strategies in mediating age changes in recall performance, it is clear that the permanent memory system (or information available in the knowledge base) exerts a significant influence on the acquisition and retention of information. Age changes in memory performance will be fully understood only through…