The central question of this report concerned the role of formal similarity in free recall of lists of trigrams and lists of three-letter word triads. Similarity was manipulated among trigrams by duplicating words. An initial study showed that lists of 16 letters were learned more rapidly than a list of 16 three-letter words. Therefore, in the…

Two groups of kindergarten children had activities involving the transitive property of matching relations and length relations, respectively. Both groups had activities involving transitivity of weight relations. A control group had instruction only on relations. Pretests of Matching Relations, Length Relations, Matching Relations Conservation,…

Four to five-year-old children were asked questions on length involving single or double comparatives in a transitive inference task. The number of comparatives varied within or across pairs. The pairs of sticks were color-coded. Initial pair-wise discrimination training on four adjacent pairs from a five stick array with only verbal feedback was…

This report reviews evidence concerned with age-related aspects of social perception processes and their effects on overt behavior. Focus is on the variability among children in comprehension and evaluation of action, motives, and consequences of modeled behavior. Findings indicated that comprehension of acts in terms of motives and correctness of…

Several concepts and techniques used to design computer simulation of human performance were employed in developing an information processing approach to task analysis. This new approach is compared and contrasted with Gagne's hierarchical task analysis model. Two conceptual levels of a behavioral objective are identified. One level, referred to…

It is possible to maintain a vision of a technologically oriented educational system which is grander than the current one in which new gadgets are used to teach the old material in a thinly disguised old way. Educational innovation, particularly when computers are included, can find better things for children to do and better ways for the child…

In a recent study by Shiffrin (1970) where list N was not recalled until after list N+1 had been studied, the length of List N was considered to be a variable that affected forgetting from long-term memory (LTM). However, due to a confounding in Shiffrin's design, recall failures could have been due either to forgetting from LTM or to lack of…

This study was conducted to determine whether efficiency in concept attainment can be increased as a function of the interaction of the use of good negative instances and increased attention as defined in terms of risk conditions. Subjects were 36 ninth-grade students of average problem solving ability as determined by IQ. Six treatment groups…

This study examines the various abilities subsumed under the process of correlational thinking. Each major ability is translated into behavioral activities and procedures in six booklets. Each booklet corresponds to a specific major ability and is placed, with respect to the other booklets, in a highly structured sequence. The specific abilities…

This short paper outlines the basic theoretical approach which the Information System for Vocational Decisions (ISVD) developers are using to solve the problem of how people learn about careers, i.e. the cognitive aspects of occupational guidance. The emphasis is on the vocational developmental process, the gradual acquisition of knowledge about…

The relationship between the effects of morphological complexity and associative production frequency was investigated in two experiments on sentence verification. The purpose of the study was to investigate how morphologically derived words are represented in memory. (Author/RM)

Contends that a student gains knowledge through the act of writing as she joins bits of information into a whole. Presents a model for scanning students' written material to determine the way ideas are related. Notes that the value of a piece of information depends on how the writer joins it with other information. (KC)

Presents guidelines for social studies teachers and a sample writing assignment to encourage student's developmental writing. Suggests that students emphasize the significance of the writer's ideas and information rather than the information itself. Establishes the relationship between thinking processes and writing and the need to break these…

The ADAPT program for freshmen emphasizes building an experiential base in introductory courses before moving to abstract formulations. The goal is to develop thinking processes that are integrated with the student's experiences. Students in the ADAPT program outperformed two comparison groups on a variety of thinking tasks. (Author)

College students learned artificial grammar under two conditions: paired associate learning (PA), and observation of exemplars (OBS). OBS induced abstract representation of the rules of grammar. PA produced very different learning--subjects knew some whole items but detected little structure. Grammar was learned largely by analogy rather than…