The major curriculum issue in Norway focuses on the form of learning as opposed to the content of learning. At the turn of the century the school program emphasized content; teaching centered around the acquisition and storage of knowledge. During the 1920s and 1930s, however, theorists stressed the form of the educational process. The process of…

While mnemonic systems have been taught and used for hundreds of years, virtually all of the experimental research into such systems has been conducted since 1965. This paper describes four mnemonic systems, all of which rely heavily on visual imagery, and summarizes research conducted on the performance values of each system. The link system, the…

The purpose of this study was to further investigate performance differences between reflective and impulsive subjects on a recognition memory task. Other researchers have proposed that these differences are based on visual analysis and that they are relatively independent of verbal processes. To test this contention, a sentence recognition task…

The relationship between retention of story propositions and inferences was studied in two experiments on groups of children who averaged five and eight years in age. In the first experiment, the motives and theme of protagonists were varied and found to affect the number and kind of inferences made by eight-year-olds. The increase in the number…

One of many aspects of the linguistic centrality of the spoken word is the "acoustic trigger" to conceptualization, the most significant primal trigger in human beings, which when activated results in contrast and comparison leading to symbolic conceptualization. The oral/aural mode, or vocal production and acoustic perception, is developmentally…

The hypothesis that reading difficulty of learning disabled (LD) children is attributable to deficiencies in verbal encoding was investigated with 60 LD and normal children (mean CA=9.1, mean IQ=103.5). Ss were compared on recall of a serial short-term memory task after pre-training of named and unnamed stimulus conditions. Data suggested that…

Two experiments tested what happens to learning performance as serial location of a word list is removed as a consistent source of associations across trials. Serial recall produced a stable level of performance and little learning. Serial recall learning may require certain memory factors in combination. (CHK)

Suggests an eclectic approach to foreign language teaching where the learner's cognitive structures and capacities as well as his entire personality would be taken into consideration. See FL 507 969 for availability information. (TL)

In teaching adults (i.e., those with language competence between the levels of a high school graduate and a teacher or interpreter), one must consider psychological factors; six are listed, including logic and mental activity in memorizing. Suggestions for drill are given. (Text is in German.) (IFS/WGA)

Three experiments were conducted to assess the effects of nonbizarre vs. bizarre pictorial elaboration on the paired-associate retention of noun pairs. Five and seven year old children served as subjects in the first two experiments and learned a list of common noun pairs by the study-test paired-associate method. Experiment 1 provided a…

The present study was conducted in order to evaluate pictorial elaboration effects in children's incidental paired-associate memory. The design of the experiment consisted of a 2 x 2 x 2 x 5 factorial with (1) grade level (kindergarten vs. second), (2) pictorial presentation (standard vs. elaborated), (3) list (two 14-pair lists of common noun…

The notion that second language instruction is more effective if begun at an early age is seen as arising from cognitive-nativist and neuropsychological postulates, and from the argument of "affective purity." Each of these positions is reviewed, along with frequently-heard objections to each. A fresh perspective on the issue is thus…

A study investigated the effects of induced mental imagery upon the comprehension of oral versus written discourse for above and below average readers. A secondary purpose of the study was to determine, through a follow-up interview, the students' ability to induce mental imagery. Sixty-three sixth grade students with above or below average…