This study was designed to investigate the functional similarity of the mental processes children use to learn verbal tasks and pictorial tasks. Children in grades 3 and 6 (n=144) and in grade 9 (n=112) were given four short paired-associate tasks entitled Pictures, Concrete Words, Abstract Words, and Japanese Characters. The tasks consisted of…

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…

This study is an attempt to investigate the usefulness of imagery instructions in learning PA nouns embedded in sentences and conjunction phrases with three different age groups (third grade, sixth grade and college students). In addition, six different item types are employed to convey increasingly dissimilar contexts from study to test trials.…

This study investigates the role of labeling in developmental increases in picture recall. In two experiments, the memory for pictorial paired-associates of first graders or second graders, fourth graders and adults was evaluated by means of a study-test cued recall procedure. In Experiment 1, the stimulus presentation duration (on-time) and the…

Research data consistently demonstrates that white school children score higher on tests of academic ability than Negro children of the same age and grade level, and that this discrepancy increases with time. Is this discrepancy due to a lack of learning proficiency on the part of Negro children or to a lack of learning opportunity? In an attempt…

Experimental results indicated that verbal intelligence was the best predictor of childrens' overall performance on a paired-associate learning task. Teachers' ratings provided a surprising degree of predictive efficiency for abstract recall which was redundant with verbal intelligence. (Author/JAC)

This study assessed the effects of bizarreness, prompt modality, and prompt type for 144 five and eight year-old children on recognition memory of pictorial pairs. Presentation of stimuli was self-paced, allowing for the collection of study time and response latency data, as well as recording number correct. While both bizarre and nonbizarre forms…

Two aspects of allocation of study time were examined among 48 third- and 48 fifth-grade children. Aspects examined were: (1) allocation of more time to more difficult material; and (2) allocation of sufficient time to meet a recall goal. Under a self-terminated procedure, children studied two booklets, one of which consisted of easy or highly…

A review of research literature revealed that some researchers felt that the use of colored rods, such as the Cuisenaire materials, in teaching number work gave perceptual support to many relationships. Experiments conducted over 3 years attempted to test some of these relationships. During each year, experimental classes in grade one were…

Relationships existing between elements of intelligence, age, and environment and meaningfulness of materials were examined along with the hypothesis that an increase in meaningfulness of materials would cause the mean difference in learning scores for different intelligence levels to first increase, then decrease. In a paired-associate task,…

The facilitation observed when paired-associates (PA) are presented or generated in a meaningful string is a phenomenon that is well-documented, and raises a number of developmental issues. The principal objective of the current research was to examine the relationship between performance on an auditory PA task and the linguistic components of…