Visual-verbal paired-associate learning (PAL) is thought to be related to reading acquisition and, more specifically, to word reading skills. To date, the uniqueness and strength of this relationship has remained unclear because most studies have been conducted in opaque orthographies such as English, and few studies have controlled for all of the…

We examined the double-deficit hypothesis in Finnish. One hundred five Finnish children with high familial risk for dyslexia and 90 children with low family risk were followed from the age of 3 1/2 years until Grade 3. Children's phonological awareness, rapid naming speed, text reading, and spelling were assessed. A deficit in rapid automatized…

Second graders were given training in monitoring the ability of strategies, the affective consequences of strategy use, or no strategy-monitoring training. When performing associative learning tasks under several instruction conditions, all training conditions produced short term effective strategy maintenance. However, only the strategy-utility…

To test the hypothesis that a bidirectional or hierarchical relationship exists between self-efficacy and mnemonic self-concept, an investigation was made of the relationship between a task-independent learning strategy and self-efficacy for a variety of cognitive skills. A total of 60 second graders were pretested for self-efficacy on four…

The purpose of this study was to resolve the focal attention versus context controversy. Eighty first-grade and 84 second-grade children from a metropolitan school system served as subjects. Subjects in each grade were randomly assigned to each of four experimental conditions: picture-word, no picture-word, picture-sentence, and no…

A relationship has been hypothesized between metamemory (the self-knowledge of memory processes that an individual can verbalize) and actual memory performance. To explore this relationship, a study was conducted, in partial replication of earlier studies, using the strategy choice paradigm for paired-associate learning (PAL) on a metamemory…

The keyword method of foreign language learning was adapted for young children learning Spanish. Rather than constructing visual images relating to the word pair, the children generated sentences. Both second- and fifth-grade students experienced large vocabulary gains. (Author/GDC)

This study investigated developmental differences in the use of the common features abstraction strategy and the exemplar learning strategy for concept acquisition. Subjects were 30 second graders and 30 fifth graders. The concepts to be learned were two categories of artificial animals which differed on five dimensions. Each dimension had three…