This chapter describes current research in cognitive psychology and considers how this work may be applied to the design of instructional materials. The nature of knowing--and of meaningful knowing--are examined, and findings from psycholinguistics and pattern recognition are integrated to provide an understanding of concept and memorization…

Black and white kindergarten and second-grade children were tested for accuracy of detection and recognition of orientation and location changes in pictures of real-world and geometric figures. The purpose was to test children's ability to detect and remember objects in a visual display. (Author/CS)

Games for use in practicing rounding numbers and mental computation using tens and hundreds are described. The importance of estimation to computation is discussed. (SD)

The role of a hypothetical metalinguistic semantic component is assessed and contrasted with the role of a semantic component derived from the very words on the printed page, and this in turn is contrasted with the influence of the graphemic, pattern analyzing component of sentence memory. (Author/DEP)

The use of paper folding to demonstrate polygons which give plane tessellations, conic sections, and the solutions to several problems is described. (SD)

The gain in word analysis for elementary school students tutored in a perceptual-conditioning approach was reported. Subjects were 98 first graders, 41 fourth graders, and 16 fifth graders. The approach instructionally separated the teaching of decoding from the teaching of comprehension; only single whole words were used and always out of…

A signature tree is a binary decision tree used to classify unknown patterns. An attempt was made to develop a computer program for manipulating signature trees as a general research tool for exploring machine learning and pattern recognition. The program was applied to the problem of speech recognition to test its effectiveness for a specific…

Using the two posters in this article, students are to search for patterns as a way of counting different types of squares and cubes obtained from a larger square or cube that is printed on the outside edge or surface. (MP)

Reviews studies of eye movements in reading and other information processing skills such as picture viewing, visual search, and problem solving. (BD)

Experiments with 81 college students and 48 fifth graders investigated the role of one form of intra-word orthographic redundancy--the characteristic asymmetric spatial distributions of letters of the alphabet across serial positions within words. Adults were sensitive to letter positional distributions, as were fifth graders who were good…

Experiments tested the predictions that words are perceived more accurately in strongly constraining word contexts than in weakly constraining word contexts, and that a strong perceptual advantage would be present for letters in words vs. letters alone or in unrelated-letter strings. Several alternative theories of word perception are discussed.…

Two ideas to use as a bulletin board display as an activity center, or as worksheets emphasizing whole number concepts are described. (JT)

Activity sheets posing problems in which students must examine and test various possibilities are presented. (SD)

Study looks at pigtailed macaque in the context of visual recognition problems adapted from a standardized test developed for use with human infants. Results demonstrate that the low-risk group easily differentiated novel from previously seen targets; the high-risk group gave no evidence of recognition. (Author/RWB)