A study examined how many and what kind of questions appear in elementary science and social studies textbooks and teachers' manuals. Approximately 7500 questions from fourth and fifth grade science and social science textbooks from three major publishers were classified according to the following characteristics: (1) type of cognitive demand; (2)…

In a study of memory use in language comprehension, 84 second grade, 54 sixth grade, and 54 college students produced elaborations on sentences. In a context elaboration, task students put sentences in different contexts, and, in a causal inferencing task, they inferred alternative reasons for events. Language understanding was measured by the…

Knowledge representations and mental models from graphically presented information were investigated for 98 college students with different levels of mathematics experience. The subjects were drawn from a remedial algebra course (n=35), a second semester calculus course (n=35), and a calculus-based statistics course (n=28); they were all exposed…

A correlational analysis was performed to examine the relationship between recognition and recall test formats. A total of 236 college students completed one of four 80-item general knowledge tests; the forms contained 20 items of each of four formats: (1) true; (2) false; (3) multiple-choice; and (4) free response. Ninety-three of the subjects…

The study evaluated a theory of gender specialization by J. H. Block that postulates that gender differences in personality and cognitive functioning are closely linked, both arising from the same sex-differentiated socialization experiences. This study tested the theory as it applies to creativity in children. Subjects were 244 children in grades…

A study investigated the hypothesis that, for adult native speakers of English, increasing syntactic complexity would lead to increased salience of phonological properties of words. The study also examined whether syntactic simplicity would lead to a greater salience of semantic properties of words. Subjects were required to name a word presented…

A definition of intrapersonal communication is needed that will encompass noncognitive elements and thus allow for a broader range of research methodologies. One possible definition is the physiological and psychological decoding, processing, storing, and encoding of messages that happen within individuals at conscious and nonconscious levels…

A study investigated developments in reasoning and memory as reflected by the discovery strategies of children taking part in a manipulative categorization and recall task. A total of 40 children (8 each of 18, 24, 30, 36, and 42 months of age) participated. Stimulus materials consisting of blocks, toy plates, discs, and plastic trees were…

The Information Acquisition Preference Inventory was used to examine cognitive styles in relationship to students' use of study tasks and to assess subjects' preferred ways of learning and problem solving. The inventory, which has students rank words describing their own learning behavior, identifies four distinctive learning preference modes:…

Intended to illuminate current understanding of how the reader's cognition and language and the text's structure affect the processing of prose, this volume contains articles written by educators, linguists, psychologists, and artificial intelligence experts on issues of comprehension research. The first part of the book examines reading…

More than 100 college students enrolled in a reading and study skills course participated in a study designed to show the effects of retrieval speed on adult reading comprehension. A microcomputer version of the Posner task was used to measure memory retrieval speed, and reading and listening comprehension were measured from McCall-Crabbs…

Cognitive processes and knowledge structures used in physics problem-solving at the high school or freshmen college level were investigated by analysis of expert and novice human problem-solving behavior and by development of computer programs which can solve informally-stated physics problems. Computer representations for the information…

The research project described will identify the component skills (cognitive processes and associated knowledge structures) required for effective problem-solving, and identify the kinds of learning which can improve problem-solving ability. These areas will be investigated by means of a computer program which can solve physics problems stated in…

A study was conducted to determine (1) the nature and range of self-testing procedures that college students use to monitor their reading comprehension; (2) whether their epistomological beliefs influence the nature of their comprehension monitoring procedures; and (3) whether the level of processing dictated by the test component of their reading…

The psychology of personality has always attempted to define the individual in relation to normative data. However, personality theory should be attempting to define individuals from an interactive measurement model, examining the individual in terms of his own subjective impressions about what he does, with a conception of what he does not do.…