This study examined the effect of the occurrence of homophones in instructional materials on the learning of new vocabulary. Forty-two junior high school seventh graders were randomly assigned to two groups of 21 each. Group one was exposed to a set of six slides that showed sentences using homophonic pairs of words (juxtaposed sentences) and then…

This report focuses on the development of general problem-solving skills which are subsumed under the general heading of metacognition: in particular, the skills of predicting, checking, monitoring, reality testing, and coordinating and controlling deliberate attempts to learn or solve problems. The report is organized in five sections: an…

Thirty-two parent couples participated in this investigation to determine whether learning patterns established in the home environment significantly affect a child's later cognitive development in traditionally school-taught subjects. This research report outlines the methodology used in the study, explains the operational criteria for the four…

Written for professionals who design and teach in preschool programs this paper reviews research on memory abilities of young children and examines the relationship between knowledge and memory among preschool children. Preliminary research of the hypothesis that elementary school environments press children to develop memory strategies is…

It sometimes happens that one is unable to recall a word or name that he feels he knows very well. This state of frustrated recall is referred to as a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experience. Two experiments were devised to compare the ability of a weak trace and a decoding-failure model to predict the conditions under which TOT reports would be most…

Several different issues in the temporal coding of words were subjected to experimental analysis. Two experiments evaluated three response measures (recency judgments, position judgments, lag judgments) used to index temporal coding. Lag judgments were found to be of little use; subjects could make valid position and recency judgments without…

Eighty-seven students took part in a study (using three experimental conditions) of the effect of question generation, question answering, and rereading on an immediate posttest and on a delayed test of knowledge of a text passage. In condition G, subjects generated multiple-choice questions that would test knowledge of each of the six content…

The method of organization in free recall in the form of either clustering or subjective organization is explored in this study. This is just one of the possible forms of retrieval that may be employed. Other possibilities include serial recall, alphabetization, and imagery. To the extent that subjects employ such other strategies, correlations…

The two studies reported here examined processes involved in learning and remembering sentences. Experiment one identified processes in sentence acquisition, and experiment two analyzed memory for sentences one week after initial learning. Subjects for the experiments were students in a college educational psychology class. The experiments…

The mnemonic consequences of semantic, acoustic, and orthographic encoding and the relationships between encoding and retrieval cues were investigated in an incidental-learning experiment involving 24 first-, third-, and fifth-grade pupils. Each child was asked one orienting question for each of 18 words; the questions differed in the type of…

The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical tradition which may broaden the scope and perhaps suggest alternate avenues of investigation of the function which we call "memory." As psychology developed during the past century, the area of memory has been strongly influenced on the theoretical level by the thinking of the British…

The organizational factors in memory relevant to learning medical diagnosis terms are discussed in this paper. Two hypotheses are tested: that the type of list organization will affect total recall; and that the type of curriculum and year in school will affect the organization of recall. Ninety-six second and third year medical students from two…

Forty reflective and 40 impulsive children were assigned to one of four treatment conditions. The learning task employed a list of 25 familiar objects, five instances from each of five categories. The four treatments were Randomized-No Instructions, Randomized-Instructed, Blocked-No Instructions, and Blocked-Instructed. Results support earlier…

The hypothesis that memory support (MS) reduces state anxiety (A-State) and errors in a computer assisted learning task was investigated. It was predicted that high A-State students given MS would make fewer errors than high A-State students given no memory support (NMS). Low A-State students were expected to perform equally as well with or…