Undergraduate students using an imagery mnemonic mediating technique involving "keywords" to learn definitions of thirty unfamiliar words performed better on a 1-week delayed comprehension test, on at least half of the definitions, than those who read and copied definitions. Mnemonic mediating strategies worked better than nonmediating strategies…

INCLUDED ARE MATERIALS FOR USE IN TEACHING AND EVALUATING 11 SELECTED CONCEPTS RELATED TO THE BIOLOGICAL CELL IN GRADES 2 TO 6. THE CONCEPTS WERE SELECTED AND THEIR ORDER DETERMINED THROUGH AN ANALYSIS OF ELEMENTARY TEXTBOOK SERIES, HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE BIOLOGY TEXTS, CYTOLOGY TEXTS, AND INFORMATION GATHERED THROUGH A PILOT STUDY. THE MATERIALS…

Benjamin Bloom's "Taxonomy of Educational Objectives" can be used effectively to develop and evaluate a sequential secondary-school curriculum in literature, regardless of the school's content emphasis or curricular philosophy. The two available volumes of the "Taxonomy"--dealing with the cognitive domain of knowledge, skills,…

Research on learning and conditioning suggests that verbal response modification does not occur in the absence of the subject's ability to define verbally (1) the response-reinforcement relationships and (2) his intention to change his behavior in the direction of reinforcement. This seems to be true for operant conditioning of verbal behavior,…

A study was designed to determine if the results of a previous investigation could be duplicated, and if so, whether the observed effect was independent of content. The results of the earlier study had indicated that shifting from one form or "code" of expression to another inhibits a student's ability to express a concept explaining a physical…

Previous experiments with nursery school children have suggested that (1) subjects of preschool age do not verbalize during transfer learning or that (2) for these subjects, self-produced verbal cues have little influence on the learning process. To investigate the relative merits of these alternative positions, research was conducted among 80…

Compared on classificatory ability were the performances of children in grades 2-4 who had been exposed to the Science Curriculum Improvement Study (SCIS) program for two years and children who had not. No significant differences in performance either quantitatively or qualitatively were detected. It was concluded that the grouping and…

Investigated was the readiness of fifth, seventh, and eighth graders trained to empirically gather data by manipulating objects and materials with their hands, and to transfer this skill to a problem situation outside the classroom. After one semester's training in the science process under investigation, the increase in the use of the strategy of…

Do success-oriented and failure-avoidant students differ in their performance because of differential attributions? Path analysis, which permits the evaluation of causal assumptions in well-specified theories, was employed to test the adequacy of the causal linkages in the attributional model of achievement behavior. Thus, although differences in…

This study investigates the hypothesis that reflective children have a tendency for detailed analysis of information whereas impulsive children process information more globally, and that differences in strategies of visual information processing of these two conceptual style groups lead to superior performance of reflective children insofar as…

Many instruments designed to assess reading comprehension reflect instructional tasks that have not clearly been shown to be a part of the process of comprehension. If the measurement instruments are to have construct validity, however, they must be created to reflect what we know about cognitive processing. Recent work in cognitive psychology has…

The classroom interaction model is a strategy to help both teachers and students with reading comprehension. It focuses on literary or informational work rather than on specific skills abstracted from the work or skills proposed by reading texts or curriculum guides. The interaction model indicates that interpretation, application, and…

The purpose of this study was threefold: to determine whether adding a mnemonic to systematically designed instruction would improve verbal retention, to establish whether retention is better for concrete or abstract information, and to determine whether mental imagery or verbal elaboration is more effective for learning concrete or abstract…

To examine the use of factual and inferential questions as adjunct material in prose learning, a study was undertaken in which undergraduate introductory psychology students used different study strategies on a prose comprehension test consisting of an equal number of factual and inferential multiple-choice items. One-hundred twenty students were…

The four papers in this collection discuss language perception and comprehension and report on experiments in those areas. The first paper, "The Influence of Non-Linguistic Knowledge on Perceiving and Verifying Sentences," discusses the reliance of language perception and comprehension on the interaction of linguistic and world…