This report focuses on the development of general problem-solving skills which are subsumed under the general heading of metacognition: in particular, the skills of predicting, checking, monitoring, reality testing, and coordinating and controlling deliberate attempts to learn or solve problems. The report is organized in five sections: an…

The theoretical framework for investigating human planning behavior and the procedures, results, and implications of two experiments involving planning in the domain of software design are presented in this report. A plan is defined as a hierarchical structure that underlies the solution to a problem; planning is the process of constructing this…

A set of studies investigated the relative importance of operative schemes and figurative (rote) memory. In Study I, 60 concrete operational children from grades 1-4 were asked to reconstruct two types of stimuli from memory. In order to separate the effects of operative and figurative skill use, learning disabled children with poor figurative…

The paper reports results and discusses implications of three studies on captioning films and television programs for deaf audiences. Study I dealt with the short-term visual memory required in recognition of fingerspelled letters, while study II focused on serial position effects and forward making (interference produced by first stimulus on the…

This study applied a frequency theory to measure the superiority of pictures over words in both discrimination learning and recognition memory tasks. Three groups of sixth grade students were given separate instructions before viewing slides of either common objects or words. The first group (control) was asked to study the items shown, the second…

The study examined whether an awareness that semantic organization is beneficial to picture recall ("semantic enhancement") precedes an awareness that certain types of organization are more beneficial than others ("levels of processing"). A series of pilot studies was conducted with kindergarten and adult subjects and a formal…

This volume contains a series of papers on algorithmic learning. Included are six reviews of research pertaining to various aspects of algorithmic learning, six reports of pilot experiments in this area, a theoretical discussion of "The Conditions for Algorithmic Imagination," and an annotated bibliography. All the papers assume a common…

The method of organization in free recall in the form of either clustering or subjective organization is explored in this study. This is just one of the possible forms of retrieval that may be employed. Other possibilities include serial recall, alphabetization, and imagery. To the extent that subjects employ such other strategies, correlations…

Two major hypotheses are currently at issue concerning the effects of semantic context on ambiguous word recognition: (1) the selective-retrieval hypothesis (SRH) maintains that a single meaning is retrieved from memory, and (2) the nonselective-retrieval hypothesis maintains that all meanings are retrieved from memory. To help clear up this…

Seven undergraduate volunteers studied a written passage on Atomic Structure and then, while answering a set of 24 multiple-choice items, talked aloud about the strategies they were using for option selection. The tape recordings of their verbal responses were analyzed for latency, memory references, and inference references. The items testing…

One hundred six recent articles are abstracted that are relevant to research carried on in the Word Identification activity. The articles cover investigations on intersensory integration, response mediation, and facets of response learning. (Author)

This research examines the effects of structure and content variables on memory and comprehension of prose passages. A process model for the comprehension of stories is proposed which assumes that stories are encoded in a hierarchical organizational framework which represents the abstract structural relationships of the plot. The implications of…

The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical tradition which may broaden the scope and perhaps suggest alternate avenues of investigation of the function which we call "memory." As psychology developed during the past century, the area of memory has been strongly influenced on the theoretical level by the thinking of the British…

The organizational factors in memory relevant to learning medical diagnosis terms are discussed in this paper. Two hypotheses are tested: that the type of list organization will affect total recall; and that the type of curriculum and year in school will affect the organization of recall. Ninety-six second and third year medical students from two…

The purpose of this experiment was to analyze developmental differences in rehearsal strategies which may mediate the commonly found age effect on free recall. As expected, significant age differences in recall were found; analysis of rehearsal strategies showed that fifth and eighth graders tended to repeat stimulus words immediately after…