This paper examines the various types and functions of mnemonic strategies that may be used to expedite recall in students with learning disabilities (LD), reviews research in this area, and outlines avenues for research. The paper concludes that mnemonic strategies have an untapped potential for improving LD students' learning, retention, and…

The medieval writer, the nun Hildegard von Bingen, learned Latin without any formal instruction in it. Her case is described as an example of language acquisition by hearing it read, sung, and expounded and by visualizing it as though it were written down in a kind of phonetic script. (21 references) (Author/LB)

Eight- through 11-year-olds watched photographic slides of faces of former preschool classmates and controls, once while their skin conductance was measured and again while reporting whether or not they recognized the faces. Both verbal report and skin conductance data showed low but above-chance differentiation between children's response to…

Comparison of external memory strategies in 31 children (ages 11 and 17) with mild mental retardation and 64 children without mental retardation found no differences between children with mental retardation and their age peers in frequency of use of object-oriented strategies. For all groups, external strategies were used more frequently than…

Implicit understanding of false belief was investigated by monitoring where preschoolers looked in anticipation of a protagonist reappearing, when the protagonist mistakenly thinks that his desired object is in a different place from where it really is. Two-year olds erroneously looked at the object's real location whereas most older children…

Five experiments examined three-year olds' ability to complete a false belief task that was manipulated in terms of their grasp of the narrative base. Children who failed a traditional task succeeded if they narrated the book version back to the experimenter. The results suggest that the structure of three-year olds' event memories is central to…

Toddlers were asked to find a hidden toy based on one hidden in a scale model of the room, after varying periods of delay. Subjects experiencing a longer delay on the first trial performed more poorly than those experiencing the long delay later in the trials. Results indicate the difficulty for children of keeping a symbol-referent relation in…

Current schooling must change based on new scientific evidence concerning the way human beings learn. To chase fads without addressing teachers' instructional behaviors or the antiquated organizational structures characterizing most schools is frivolous. There is a broad gap between performance and learning and an even broader gap between…

Investigates comprehension problems of children whose decoding skills are normal but whose reading comprehension skills are poor. Concludes that working memory processes are not a major causal factor in the creation of the comprehension difficulties identified in these poor comprehenders. (RS)

Compared 24 month olds' ordered recall of events constrained by enabling relations with that of arbitrarily ordered events equated for familiarity and temporal invariance. Children's ordered recall of events constrained by enabling relations was superior to that of arbitrarily ordered ones, indicating that, after experience with an event in…

This study found that 331 Toronto (Ontario, Canada) adolescent and adult subjects with learning disabilities could be grouped into three subtypes: (1) arithmetic disability, (2) reading disability, and (3) reading and arithmetic disabilities. Each group differed significantly from the others on tests of reading, spelling, memory, and other…

Using the Recognition Memory Test, Digit Span subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised, and the Knox Cube Test as markers for malingered memory deficits was studied with 100 university students, federal inmates, and patients with head injuries. Malingerers performed more poorly than injured patients on all three tests. (SLD)

Two experiments involving 65 college students support the hypothesis that, when students read about a familiar topic, they use a reinstatement-and-integration strategy in which familiar knowledge is retrieved from long-term memory along with some information about the original context in which facts were learned. (SLD)

Investigates whether audio/video redundancy improves memory for television messages. Suggests a theoretical framework for classifying previous work and reinterpreting the results. Suggests general support for the notion that redundancy levels affect the capacity requirements of the message, which impact differentially on audio or visual…

Individual differences in procedural and declarative learning of a sequence-learning task by 455 adolescents were measured and compared to one another and to scores on a performance battery. A framework is proposed to explain the results based on a combination of approaches to explain dissociations found in memory. (SLD)