This study investigates the relationship between temporal organization and the rate at which discrimination-reversal learning mastery occurs within sixth-grade students. Subjects were 22 male and 30 female students from a predominantly white, middle class rural school. Temporal behavior was assessed with a task that had subjects reproduce standard…

Two samples, the first consisting of 13 and 16-year-olds and adults, the second consisting of children from kindergarten, second and sixth grades, are interviewed to measure the cognitive processes used to evaluate the credibility of television content. Additional goals include measuring the relationship between the use of these cognitive…

Sixteen sixth-grade students participated in a study of the reasoning strategies employed by good and poor readers. Students, trained in applying introspective procedures, completed instruments that measured verbal reasoning, determining cause and effect, reading for inference, and determining main idea. Protocols obtained during five consecutive…

This study attempted to elucidate the effects of context and level of processing on comprehension and memory for prose. Two aspects of memory for prose were investigated: the amount of information remembered and the semantic interpretation assigned to ambiguous paragraphs. Task instructions and exposure duration of the passages were manipulated to…

Forty-eight grade-three children and 48 grade-eight children were presented respectively with six- and eight-letter sequences for written free recall. The older children, as had adult subjects in previous studies, showed a greater tendency to recall serially with a four-letters-per-second presentation rate than with a half- or…

This study investigates the effects of content sequence on student learning. The treatments, a spatial and conceptual instructional sequence each consisting of identical content elements, were administered to students in a two-year college Botany course. Hypotheses tested were that sequence would have an effect on student perceptions of the…

A national sample of 503 Dutch people aged 15 and over who were accessible by telephone was used in this longitudinal study of reactions to a series of eight broadcasts of "All in the Family." Attitude scales were developed for three independent variables--ethnocentrism, lifestyle intolerance, and parental authoritarianism. Questionnaire…

Cognitive preferences of 177 able, science-oriented high school students who participated in a secondary science training program at the University of Iowa in the summer were studied. A Biology Cognitive Preference Test (BCPT) was administered, in which 20 items required ranking and 20 items required rating on a four-point scale. The items were…

This paper presents a theory of human information processing. Information processing refers to the perception, encoding, recoding, storage, retrieval and manipulation of information by the brain. This theoretical model takes a developmental perspective in explaining human performance on tasks that require thinking, reasoning and remembering.…

The cognitive levels of 60 children from grades one, three, and five were compared with their linguistic performance on selected examples of similes and metaphors. Cognitive level was measured using Raven's Colored Progressive Matrices; a new instrument was developed to assess children's linguistic performance. Results indicated a significant…

Nothing is of more practical use to a writing teacher than a unified theory of writing. (JH)

A study is reported in which pairs of synonyms, antonyms, coordinates, and super super-subordinates were presented dichotically to university students. After each pair the subject reported what he heard. In one condition the two members of a pair were presented simultaneously, and in another they were presented sequentially. (Author/RM)

Experiments are reported in which semantically interrelating sentences were presented to subjects as discrete items, and inference tests were given to measure the degree to which the similar information had been stored in the same memory system. Results suggest that verbal information is sometimes encoded into an episodic system. (Author/RM)

A self-observation and self-report procedure is proposed that will assist teachers in discovering their students' learning strategies and may generate knowledge about the second language learning process. Transcriptions of segments of interviews with four students illustrate the procedure involved in eliciting student strategies. (Author/RM)

Number conservation skills were investigated in 10 8-to 16-year-old mentally retarded children (IQ 29-65). (CL)