It is proposed that many phenomena of human hypothesis testing can be understood in terms of a general positive test strategy. With this strategy, there is a tendency to test cases that are expected to have the property of interest rather than those expected to lack that property. (Author/LMO)

High among the many purposes of education is the conjecture that higher-levels of cognitive activity are important to learning and intellectual development. One of the most exciting educational implications is the leverage that one may expect by enhancing learning at the cognitive and metacognitive levels. Despite the relatively rich history in…

The explosion of knowledge is accompanied by implosions in the form of theories which simplify knowledge and make it easier to learn and use. (Editor)

Subject matter concept attainment by adult students was studied by experimentally manipulating instructional instances which were either positive or negative, clear or obscure, or presented in large or small variety. (Author/JA)

Preschool children were trained on a color relevant oddity problem by one of 3 methods: (1) increased salience of the oddity relationship, (2) instruction on solution rule, or (3) a combination of both. Generality of results were probed with a form-relevant transfer problem. (DP)

One hundred and two subjects were given three verbal concept acquisition tasks. Repression, High defensiveness, and low psychoastenia were found to be significantly associated with high acquisition scores. (Author/KM)

It was predicted that high-scoring students would be better able to answer correctly questions directed at knowledge of principles and that this superior knowledge would result in better performance on questions on trivial materials as well. (Author/KM)

Results indicate that verbalization is the preferred symbolic process in young children. Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Los Angeles, California, 1969. (MH)

Learning is analyzed into two components, monitoring and strategy learning, using a technique that avoids the confounding of the Durling and Schick method. A strategy analysis showed that most subjects employed the same strategy across problems. Strategy shifters displayed a small tendency toward more efficient strategies. (Author/GK)

Formulates rules for adapting the appropriate amount of instruction to learning needs in computerized adaptive instructional systems. The framework is derived from Bayesian decision theory and the procedures are demonstrated for the problem of determining the optimal number of interrogatory examples for concept learning in the Minnesota Adaptive…

Reviews research on student learning of science conceptions and presents major findings. Traces changes in science teaching and learning over the last two decades and looks at a variety of teaching schemes that aim to support meaningful learning in science, some based on conceptual change. (Contains 13 references.) (Author/YDS)

Addresses Nelson's commentary on Ward, Vela, and Hass' study of children's category learning (both of which are in this issue). Discusses the issue of whether a holistic processing view provides a better account of children's learning than does an analytical view. (PCB)