The results of two experiments on understanding metaphors were found to be incompatible with the popular view that deaf children have particular problems in understanding metaphorical uses of natural language. Profoundly deaf children were presented with several short stories and were instructed to select (from a set of four alternatives) the…

This paper describes an approach to task analysis which seeks to identify potential sources of difficulty in the self-discovery of improved procedures by students who have been taught simpler procedures. The approach considers novices' procedures in terms of the changes needed to produce an expert procedure; the knowledge required to make those…

Current research in psycholinguistics has included studies of factors influencing effective verbal communication--the effect of sequences of words and operations within an instruction; effects of instruction and self-instruction on performance; and the presentation of complex interrelated rules such as those found in legal documents, regulations,…

The effect of the interaction between imagery level and number of semantic propositions on junior high readers at three ability levels was studied, using an instrument that compared two levels of imagery at each of five levels of semantic propositions. Syntax, word frequency, and number of arguments were held constant. The results indicated that…

This paper applied findings from studies using the kind of viewing measures used by social scientists, to the relationship between programing and viewership when viewership is measured by means used by producers. Total aggregate viewership and the relationship of viewers' ages to viewership was concentrated on. Effects of competing programs on…

The present research was designed primarily to investigate the type of instruction needed to help children learn difficult principles. A total of 159 fifth graders (each assigned to one of six experimental conditions) read lessons which dealt with principles from two content areas (mathematics and language arts). Lessons varied in the number of…

To find out what factors are involved in a child's learning of syntax, investigators studied the syntactic complexity of the language a mother and child use when talking to each other. The complexity measure used was one developed by Dr. Sheldon Frank and Dr. Harry Osser, and is based on the concepts of generative grammar and transformations.…

Decision-theoretic testing is used to explore whether students can improve their realism, i.e. congruence between reported and true probabilities. Randomized sets of math problems were presented at computer terminals to 49 seventh graders from two classes (high/low achievers) over a period of three weeks. The subject assigned values to each of…

A simple device called a "wire labyrinth" was used in an experiment involving learning of a two-hand motor task. The Ss were asked, after completing each of 7 successive trails, to give their estimates of perceived (subjective) difficulty of the task. For this purpose, the psychophysical method of magnitude estimation was used. Time was…

Three studies compared learning and problem-solving performances of normal and familially-retarded children on tasks differing in complexity, and one study investigated motivational-personality differences. Main purpose of the first three studies was to investigate the controversy between developmental and defect theorists in mental retardation.…

Accuracy of memory for left-right orientation of single forms varying in meaningfulness and complexity was studied in 120 subjects at 5 age levels from kindergarten to adulthood. Complexity was found to be unimportant, but orientation of meaningful figures was remembered better than orientation of non-meaningful figures at all ages. (GO)

While thematic curriculum designs based on Bruner's structuralism are a great improvement over the old chronological literature anthologies, they still ignore several important contexts in which a literary work might be studied. The multifunctional approach can provide this complexity of contexts. (SJL)

The language competency of learning disabled (LD) children as it relates to social situations demanding interpersonal communication skills was examined in 28 LD and normal elementary school children. (DLS)

Various experiments demonstrated that the difficulty level of several performance-type intelligence test tasks is determined directly by stimulus and task variables that vary the information to be processed. The implications of these findings for intelligence and the problems of an experimental approach to the measurement of intelligence are…

In a sentence-completion task, eighty sixth-grade students were assigned specific difficult goals or general goals ("do your best"). Subjects received one of four levels of monetary incentive. Specific difficult goals produced higher performance than nonspecific across various incentive conditions, and maintained those levels when previously…