Using 48 educable mentally handicapped students (ages 12-18) as subjects, a study investigated the effect of prompted and trial-and-error procedures on the learning of a paired-associate task, when items (concrete nouns of less than six letters) in one list were drawn from the same categories (animals, food) and in a second list, from different…

Essays call for the development of a theory of university adult education and for the development of new and expanded research into basic problems of curriculum planning, learning theory, and evaluation of the results of liberal adult education programs. The urban university is asked to examine its purposes in adult education, which is often its…

The author objects to criticism of current programed language instruction (PLI) materials. In a "conventional FL (foreign language) class" of 120 class hours a year, the amount of time spent in active, immediately reinforced responding by any individual student would be less than 100 minutes. This is in contrast to the shortest PLI program (53…

Although literature on educational objectives dates back more than 50 years, the last 20 years have seen a renewal of interest in objectives. The taxonomy approach currently in use expresses objectives in terms that are evidenced by pupil behavior. This approach deals with objectives that relate to three separate domains of learning: Cognitive,…

This is a discussion of another phase of bilingualism--structural difficulties in the target language of the student which impede his second language acquisition. The paper focuses on errors in learning English which do not derive from transfers from another language, and which cannot be predicted from contrastive analysis. These are intralingual…

A study was designed to examine the contribution of intrinsic arousal (individual differences) and induced arousal to children's comprehension of film content with short- and long-term retention intervals. Intrinsic arousal was measured by a salivary response measure; induced arousal was manipulated by white auditory noise. The latter was…

In the first chapter Brownell critically examines the psychological bases of the three most common theories of arithmetic instruction: drill, incidental learning, and meaning. In chapter 2 the results of a nation-wide survey of actual teaching practices are reported. Chapter 3 presents a contrast between "informational arithmetic" and…

This yearbook presents theories of learning, discusses the research on which they are based, and suggests ways to apply these theories to concrete learning situations. After an introduction to the more prominent theories in chapter 1, the remaining chapters present more specific areas and questions. The next three chapters deal with motivation,…

Centrally concerned with research which investigated how people learn from pictures, this issue of "Viewpoints" provides a series of review articles and a bibliography. The first article reviews recent research using adult subjects in commonly used psychological research paradigms--recognition memory, recall associate learning--and introduces…

Five assumptions underlie task analysis procedures in instructional development in higher education. These are: 1) content and instructional strategy are independent; 2) most courses involve two types of content--concepts and operations; 3) two levels of abstraction are involved--generalities and instances; 4) four levels of behavior are most…

The results of a number of experiments with the memorizing of several different subject-matters are presented in such a way that the relationship between number of opportunities for error (word elements faded) and number of errors actually made can be observed for individuals and groups. The particular selection of word elements to be taught by…

Designed as a complement to Volume 1 on the normal infant (available as EC 003 414), the text examines the following areas: neurological examination of the newborn, neurobehavioral organization of the newborn, neuropsychology examinations in young children, learning of motor skills on the basis of self-induced movements, factors in vulnerability…

This curriculum is an intermediate result of a research program exploring the application of detailed behavior analysis procedures to the problem of designing sequences of learning objectives. The research program, part of the Primary Education Project (PEP), is an attempt to develop a systematic method of specifying and validating learning…

Behavioristic, nativistic, and cognitive theories of language acquisition are discussed. Linguistically-oriented theories are compared with learning-oriented theories, and four controversial issues of frequency of stimuli, imitation expansion, and meaning are reviewed. The theories, according to the author, are rather unsubstantial at present. The…

This book has been written to assist preservice and inservice elementary school teachers in understanding the rationale behind new spelling programs and in applying linguistically-based theories and strategies to the organization and teaching of an effective spelling curriculum. Part 1 presents current basic research in learning theory and…