This book is an introduction to the psychological study of basic learning processes in children. Written for students who are not majors in psychology and who do not have much familiarity with the technical vocabulary of psychology, it has two themes: even the most basic kinds of learning are included by cognitive processes or mental activities;…

The concept of an algorithm derives from the physical sciences, but it has often been misunderstood and misapplied in the social sciences and in education. The theoretical and practical significance of algorithms stems from their applicability to problems of learning, instruction, and instructional design, and they may potentially provide the…

The primary purpose of this study was to determine empirically whether an individual's cognitive style differentially influences his hypothesizing behavior within a relatively simple information processing task. A characteristic of cognitive style explored is the manner in which an individual perceives and analyzes a stimulus configuration;…

This study examined possible relationships between the analytic/global dimension of cognitive style, as defined by Davis and Klausmeier (1970) and measured by the Children's Embedded Figures Test (CEFT), and two modes of instruction varying in the level of guidance provided the learner. Sixty Anglo subjects (eight and nine years old), identified…

Evidence from studies of memory for meaningful materials such as sentences and prose passages is reviewed in this paper with emphasis on its implications for the nature of the memory representation. It is argued that models of memory which involve the retrieval of stored copies of originally presented material cannot account for two crucial…

A total of 47 6-year-old children listened to stories after which they either constructed pictorial representations of those stories from a set of backgrounds and cut-out figures and objects, or they spent equivalent time classifying geometric figures. The pictorial elaboration task inhibited recall of the stories. This contrasts with results…

The present study was conducted to demonstrate the power of imagery instructional sets to improve the recall of units more complex than in the traditional paired associate (P-A) paradigm and to evaluate imagery as a memory organizer. Forty-eight sixth grade children were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions, defined by the…

This study undertook to reconcile the views of cognitive and behavioral learning theorists on the issue whether learning without awareness (LWA) is possible, and if so, the circumstances under which it occurs. In Study One, two reinforcement procedures were compared in a structured verbal conditioning task. Study Two was a replication of Study…

Beginning with a preconceived bias that "real" (i.e. nonartifactual) age differences in transfer and retroaction do exist, the author feels that the available literature permits no clear conclusions relating the process of aging and transfer mechanisms, or aging and retroaction. Research to date is viewed as assuming that "interference" manifests…

The major aims of this conference on guided learning were: (1) to examine research and educational practice relevant to development of a theory of guided learning; (2) to develop a theory and stimulate educational practice and research. Transcripts of the presentations of five speakers and of the ensuing discussion to creative development, a…

An experiment was conducted on 13 normal and 13 retarded readers, matched for age, IQ, and vocabulary. Recent findings suggested that reading retardates had difficulty in the cross-modal transfer of information from the auditory to the visual modality (e.g., converting auditory taps into visual dot patterns). Prior research by the present authors…

It was hypothesized that by age 8 children would manifest an adult meaning system, and that 5-year-old children would not. An adult meaning system allows an adult to transcend component word meanings and integrate, in the presence of a speaker, the underdetermined and the factual proposition into a meaningful whole. Subjects were 60 5- and…

The relationship between selective attention and learning is investigated in this paper. It is proposed that two forms of attention exist: (1) inspectional attention, which is a simple matching pocess where perceived stimuli are compared with an internal model of the stimulus for which the individual is searching, and (2) comprehensional…

This study was designed to test the effects of message summaries on the recall of main points of an informative message. Two different types of summary techniques, a mnemonic and a traditional type, were identified and compared with each other and with a third treatment involving no summaries. One hundred and eleven volunteer subjects were…

The purpose of this study was to determine if being next-in-line to perform would render strong effects on the student's storage and retrieval of information. The subjects were 45 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory educational psychology course. Fifteen subjects were arranged in a large circle and were told that they were going to…