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…

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 deep structure description of a sentence marks the actual grammatical relationships that exist among the words. It is in the deep structure that "meaning" is rendered. Two sentences that are marked differently in deep structure might give rise to the same description in surface structure. Three experiments examined the "psychological reality"…

These four studies in a series deal with good and poor readers' utilization of selected cues in paired-associate learning. Specific cues considered were color, order of presentation, and verbal mediators. Answers to two basic questions were sought: (1) Do the selected cues have a facilitative effect upon children's paired-associate learning? (2)…

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…