One of the most typical ways in which people learn is by inferring general rules from examples. In recent years, significant progress has been made toward understanding how learning from examples can occur, determining when it does occur, and identifying conditions that promote it. This paper reviews these results and then suggests a program of…

The role of imagery is assessed in verbal concept identification and evidence is found that some concepts can be coded as images. (Author/AM)

Research supported by the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity grant 1492.

Two perspectives of descriptive research are discussed: first-order, which describes the world as it is; and second-order, which describes the world as people experience it. The latter perspective is known as experiential description. Research in a variety of disciplines, notably the work of Darwin, Werner, and Piaget, has provided experiential…

Principles of concept formation extracted from an extensive review of theoretical and empirical work in psychology, and their relationship to home economics are presented. The present attempts of home economics educators to identify the basic concepts of the field and organize curriculums around them are potentially fruitful, both for students and…

This study examined the ability of preschool children to process and use conceptual category information in a disrcimination learning task. A total of 60 boys and girls between the ages of 2 1/2 and 4 years completed a 3-choice discrimination learning task. On each of 12 trials, a child was presented with three magazine photographs: one of an…

The three basic language learning models are the rote-memory model (prescriptive), the abilities model (behavioristic), and the critical age model. If this last model, a deterministic one based on observable facts about the human condition, becomes as popular in American schools as it is in British schools, language will become an important aspect…

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;…

This study investigated the extent to which certain aspects of the structure of a learner's memory following instruction corresponded with the structure of the instructional material. Content structure was represented using digraph theory. The digraph analysis revealed a formal structure built substantially on six specific concepts. Cognitive…

Examined were the effects of verbal labels alone and in combination with two types of instruction on the concept attainment of 80 educable mentally retarded and 80 normal boys of school age matched for mental age. For learning the concept "equilateral triangle" Ss were randomly assigned to one of four experimental treatment conditions: verbal…

This study assessed the value of teaching young children the relevant attributes of a concept and the conceptual rule by which the attributes are organized. It was hypothesized that only if children had prior knowledge of both components could they follow instructions designed to teach a new concept. It was further hypothesized that children who…

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…

A series of exploratory studies and three experiments dealing with conceptual rule learning are reported in this paper. Discussants related the results to subject matter fields and to educational research and development. Four groups of subjects, five to twelve years old, solved six rule learning problems. It was concluded that younger children…