With few exceptions, the development of adult intelligence assessment instruments has proceeded along the lines of the Binet-Simon tests for children, stressing psychological assessment over the evaluation of what an individual knows. These tests, developed over 90 years ago, were quite effective in predicting school success, but were much less…

The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of eighteen 11th grade high school chemistry students' prior mathematical knowledge on their understanding of certain chemical concepts (symbol, formula, and equation). It also investigated students' ideas about the meaning of plus sign, reaction sign, and the relationships between subscript, and…

The proposition that the mastery of complex tasks embodies several components was studied for 236 students in an undergraduate introductory financial accounting course. A new curriculum was developed for the course that included in-depth exposure to the actual financial statements of a company and the understanding of the structural relationships…

Defining reading as a constructive process involving an interaction of the reader, the text, and the context, this paper offers a model of student cognitive processing that incorporates research in reading, thinking, teaching, and instructional materials. The first section of the paper provides the theoretical context for developing the model,…

Using computer controlled text presentation that permitted the measurement of reading time for individual sentences, a study tested two hypotheses concerning how schemata guide reading comprehension. The focusing hypothesis suggested that the schemata activated by the reader's perspective might identify relevant information to which additional…

Examines the effect of prior knowledge activation on sixth-grade readers' comprehension of compatible and incompatible text. Results support the notion that prior knowledge may intefer with, rather than facilitate, reading comprehension under certain conditions. (HOD)

Reports on a study that examined the effects of prior knowledge and topic interest on the reading comprehension of seventh- and eighth-grade students. The results suggested that both prior knowledge and topic interest were autonomous factors in reading comprehension. (HOD)

The purpose of this study was to determine if factors to predict success in college biology (i.e., prior knowledge of biology or reasoning ability) depend on the instructional method employed (i.e., expository or inquiry). Reasoning ability was found to account for a significant amount of variance in final examination scores, regardless of…

The effects of students' misconceptions, declarative knowledge, and stimulus conditions on students' solutions to a problem in basic electricity were studied for 80 undergraduates at Iowa State University (Ames). The implications of the findings of influence by knowledge and stimulus conditions are discussed. (SLD)

Studied prior knowledge as a mediator of effectiveness of the elaborative interrogation strategy for 50 male and 50 female undergraduates in a learning task. The elaborative interpretation group had significantly greater matching scores on an associative memory test for animal information than the control group only for familiar animals. (SLD)

Beginning teachers in Northern Ireland and the United States conducted structured inquiry projects in which they investigated elementary children's understanding of history and social studies. Interviews with the teachers and analysis of their written assignments indicate that these investigations challenged their beliefs about children's prior…

This study examined the relationship between level of experience and application of prior financial knowledge on the ability of auditing students and professionals to answer questions about financial statements. This study answers the following questions: (1) Is there a positive relationship between experience and the number of causal relations…

This study sought to determine the effects of prior knowledge and other personal variables on the achievement of undergraduates in an economics course at the Open University of the Netherlands (OuN). A total of 100 law and 100 economics students enrolled in "Economics and Money" were tested on subject mastery at the end of the course.…

In educational psychology research the concept "prior knowledge" is not always clearly described, but it is important to distinguish prior knowledge state (PKS) components as well as possible and to elucidate the relations among these elements. An in-case-study was conducted into the operationalizing of the concept of prior knowledge and…

The effects of mobilizing prior knowledge on information processing were studied. Two hypotheses, the cognitive set-point hypothesis and the selective attention hypothesis, try to account for the facilitation effects of prior knowledge activation. These hypotheses predict different recall patterns as a result of mobilizing prior knowledge. In…