After three years of study, planning and preparation, Ottawa University instituted a new program of education in the Fall of 1970. The essential focus is upon the undergraduate and the learning process via an integrative interdisciplinary basic program which extends beyond the usual classroom limitations. The program is humanistically oriented and…

The author developed three instruments which operationally defined certain probability concepts and combinatorial abilities and subsequently used the instruments to classify the 90 subjects of the study according to their conceptual strategies or ability levels. The subjects were high school biology students from one school; all were taught by the…

Investigated was the assumption that college students are fully capable, by the time they enter college, of operating at the level of formal thought. The subjects selected for this study were students in chemistry and physics courses at a state university and an inner-city community college. Each student was tested with a Piegetian task to…

This report examines the process of learning large complex subject matters, by asking about the ways in which teachers and students communicate the necessary knowledge structures to each other and how a student comes to select an appropriate paradigm for solving a problem and revising inappropriate solutions. Protocols from several different…

Three experiments tested the generality of the conclusion that associative unlearning is minimal in the A-B, A-D paradigm. In Experiment 1, single-trial study of A-D, following single-trial study of A-B, did not produce retroactive inhibition in the recognition of A-B. In Experiment 2, A-B was acquired by associative matching. The interpolated…

As the proceedings of a symposium held at the 1973 Annual Meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, theoretical and experimental results from research in the use of information theory to study human learning are presented in this volume to reflect the efforts made at the University of Pittsburgh over the past four…

Reported is an examination of the effects of a newly devised science course upon the logical thought processes of college freshmen. Five tasks designed to determine whether the student did thinking logically when presented with problems of conservation of volume, reversible operations, reconciliation of irrelevant variables, and elimination of…

A study was conducted to explore the developmental differences in utilizing a superordinate context during learning and to examine the stability of the advantage of a superordinate context at retention across grade level. Ss were 98 students from third and fifth grade classes, who were divided approximately evenly by sex. A 2 x 2 x 2 factorial…

A study was conducted to examine the situational generality of extended learning in early infancy. Ss were 17 infants within one week of eight weeks of age. All but two were Caucasian, and all were from middle-income families. The apparatus consisted of a pressure sensing pillow which, when placed under the infant's head or feet, was sensitive to…

Kindergarten and first grade children were given a paired-associate learning task following one of five types of strategy-training procedures. In the motor training conditions, subjects generated interactions involving pairs of toys by playing with them or by drawing pictures of them. It was found that relative to simple imagery practice, motor…

The idea of using demonstrations to support lectures is far from novel, but as other communicating media become more and more sophisticated, the simple practical demonstration is enjoying renewed popularity. This may be because audiences have been exposed to so many advanced presentation techniques that they have become skeptical to the extent…

This paper is a letter to Professor Hans G. Furth discussing his book "Piaget for Teachers" as related to the program of the Campus School at State University College in Plattsburgh, N.Y. The letter is from the three teachers who work with a classroom of 54 youngsters. There are approximately equal numbers of 4-, 5-, 6-, and 7-year olds…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of hypothesis testing instructions compared to brief instructions on the speed of shift problem solution of grade school age subjects, in order to provide information on the development of hypothesis testing behavior in children and the sampling characteristics of hypothesis testing in these…

In this essay, research done on concept learning is discussed. The study analyzes concept learning as one form of learning, formulating guidelines for teaching concepts, and describes the abilities underlying the attainment of concepts. An analytical model is presented; various operations such as concrete concepts and identity concepts are…

Two papers are included in this report. "Control and Feedback in the Environment of a Computer Tutor" investigates some control and feedback properties of a tutorial environment comprised of a student, his computer tutor, and the designer of the computer tutor. Three classes of computer tutor are described: rigid, generative, and knowledgeable.…