The purpose of the study was to examine instructional sequences to determine how prior experience with subordinate tasks affected mastery of a superordinate task and to determine the overall efficiency of performance within a sequence. In Experiment I, 72 fifth graders were presented tasks in addition problems from a modulo-twelve system; in…

The purpose was to determine whether different levels of education, race, and sex affect the degree of conservation of mass, weight, and volume attained by minimally educated adults. Subjects were 30 white and 30 black females and 30 white and 30 black males enrolled in Adult Basic Education classes, with 40 subjects each at grade levels 0-3, 4-6,…

Fifteen kindergarten children, who began the study with Piaget's stage II seriation capabilities (they could serial order sticks but could not insert a number of sticks into an already ordered set), were individually given 30 minutes of seriation training on three consecutive days. Cue fading and the manipulation of discrimination levels were used…

A test was designed to measure whether or not the child's conceptualization of space would demand that two topological properties of figures (connectedness, and openness and closedness) remain invariant when the figures were subjected to transformations. Ninety children, 30 from each of ages four, six, and eight, were tested. Six items were given…

A summary of current theoretical work in the area of concept formation is presented with emphasis on the presentation of thinking in theory. Examination of the logic relating thinking to behavior leads to criticism of the tendency to subordinate "behavior" to underlying processes. The difficulties inherent in analyses of this type are that…

Two studies were performed to evaluate the extent to which response patterns and sustained attentiveness is a function of the demands of a secondary task, primary task difficulty, and feedback arrangements. The first study varied primary task stimulus difficulty level, feedback arrangements on the primary task, and presence of the secondary task.…

The study investigates some of the procedures involved in training teachers to use their verbal attention (to students) on a contingent basis. The results suggest that a combination of modeling and feedback can increase a teacher's positive responses to students. Both film-mediated modeling and feedback of performance were used to change one…

THE EFFECTS OF INTERPOLATED ITEMS ON THE LEARNING AND RETENTION OF INDIVIDUAL STIMULUS-RESPONSE (S-R) UNITS IN PAIRED-ASSOCIATE LEARNING WERE INVESTIGATED. EXPERIMENTS WERE DESIGNED TO DETERMINE THE EFFECTS OF INTERFERENCE PRODUCED BY OTHER ITEMS WHICH OCCUR NATURALLY WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF A STANDARD PAIRED-ASSOCIATE TASK. IN ADDITION, SEVERAL…

COMBINATIONS OF OVERT AND COVERT RESPONSE PRACTICES WERE ANALYZED TO DETERMINE OPTIMAL COMBINATIONS FOR THE LEARNING PROCESS FOR (1) DIFFERENT LEARNING TASKS, (2) STUDENTS OF DIFFERENT ABILITIES, AND (3) DIFFERENT MEDIA OF PRESENTATION. IT WAS OBSERVED THAT PRACTICALLY ALL FORMS OF HUMAN LEARNING INVOLVE SUCH COVERT ACTIVITIES AS OBSERVING,…

This report provides an overview of concept and principle-learning studies and traces the theoretical basis for schema theory, which asserts that all knowledge is assimilated into a general cognitive framework. The procedures of an original study are described, which was designed to test the hypothesis that the inclusion of a "domain…

Four experiments were conducted to determine whether staging, or the prominence given to various segments of information through manipulation of prose structure, affects recall of the content of prose passages. In all of the experiments, pairs of passages were used in which members of each pair had identical content but different staging patterns.…

A brief review of some of the classic studies on thinking ability and thought processes, outlining five principles for the teaching of thinking. (SJL)

Different types of understandings are presented as different facets of the development of the mental processes. (MP)

Data analysis revealed that a post-organizer had a significant facilitating effect on immediate free-recall in a controlled lecture in college statistics, but no effect on immediate content recognition or delayed free-recall. (MP)

This study explores the acquisition of proportionality by investigating the relationship between an understanding of proportionality and the development of cognitive structure in the domain of mechanics. (Author/MA)