A method was developed for characterizing and comparing the semantic content of picture-text combinations used as stimuli in research on reading procedural instructions. The written directions for assembling a toy model were analyzed, and sets of propositions in the instructions were constructed using C. H. Frederiksen's discourse analysis model.…

A probe recall short-term retention task was used to test the applicability of the "phonological recoding" (Conrad, 1972) and "flexible decoding" (Smith, 1972) models to processing tactics used by readers of Chinese. Subjects were 45 adult speakers of Cantonese. Stimuli were lists of Chinese characters which varied in terms of phonological and…

Three questions were addressed in this study: 1) What are the levels of relationships among level of moral development, attitudes toward teaching and role specific self-concept in a group of entering teacher education candidates? 2) What differences exist between elementary and secondary candidates in areas of moral development, teacher attitudes…

Past studies have shown that, although older adults are more likely than young adults to fail various concrete operational tasks, age differences on these tasks can be eliminated through short-term training. To test the trainability of formal, rather than concrete, operations college students (N=27) were compared with older adults (N=27).…

Mandler (1969) found that one-third of adult subjects were seriators and two-thirds were categorizers in a task where either strategy could be employed. Study 1 was a replication of his procedure with children from Grades 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9. While there was weak evidence that some older subjects chose the categorial strategy, there was little…

Questioning as an after-reading activity is not sufficient alone as a strategy to develop reading comprehension. This paper presents instructional strategies to support comprehension throughout a student's particular reading encounter. Included are four strategies which involve students: (1) have students specify content expectancies in a variety…

The Degrees of Reading Power Test was developed to address some existing problems in testing comprehension. The test design reflects the need to consider problems of passage dependency, difficulty of questions, tests for continuous text, and sensitivity to gains. It emphasizes a set of response options controlled for familiarity, a text that is…

Employing a cognitive/motivational analysis, a study was undertaken to determine some specific self-perceptions that might contribute to motivational and performance deficits observed in children with reading difficulties. A total of 72 children of relatively good, average, and poor reading ability were assessed on tasks in which success and…

To determine if imagery mediates memory for signs and words, 80 sign-language-fluent Ss -- half of whom were congenitally deaf and half of whom were normal-hearing -- were tested by varying the imagery values of stimuli. The relative efficacy of word and sign codes in processing and retrieving information was studied by systematically varying the…

This article considers the physiological, psychological, and aesthetical parameters of video on two levels--practical and conceptual. Physiological effects and processes are defined as those which occur within a human being when viewing a video event, while videopsychology focuses on how people use the medium of video and the possibilities for…

This review of the literature related to research on oral communication in the classroom pursues two issues: the types of oral contributions students make and whether those types are related to school achievement. In considering research on oral communication in classrooms, the paper looks at information that considers whether the communication…

Auditory imagination is used in this paper to describe a number of issues and activities related to sound and having to do with listening, thinking, recalling, imagining, reshaping, creating, and uttering sounds and words. Examples of auditory imagination in religious and literary works are cited that indicate a belief in an imagined, expected, or…

This study explored sex differences in the Future Temporal Perspectives (FTP) of children. The influences of age, social class and intelligence were also investigated, or FTP was generally believed to be affected by them. Subjects were 96 boys and 96 girls, selected from 26 schools in Nova Scotia, from three age groups: 9.6-11.0, 12.0-13.6, and…

This study investigates the strategies people use to acquire knowledge from maps. Among the questions examined were (1) what distinguishes poor learners from good learners, and (2) how do the learning strategies of map-using experts differ from those of nonexpert learners? Eight subjects participated in the study. Five were undergraduate students…

Forty-three first-grade children, who had received no formal instruction in addition and subtraction, were individually administered 20 problems that could be solved using addition or subtraction. The problems were selected to represent the following semantic types: joining, separating, part-part-whole, comparison, and equalizing. Responses were…