One of the most typical ways in which people learn is by inferring general rules from examples. In recent years, significant progress has been made toward understanding how learning from examples can occur, determining when it does occur, and identifying conditions that promote it. This paper reviews these results and then suggests a program of…

The role of imagery is assessed in verbal concept identification and evidence is found that some concepts can be coded as images. (Author/AM)

The principal goal of history teaching is to train students to become capable of doing new things, creating, discovering, and gathering evidence as "scientifically" as possible. (Author/ND)

The cognitive operations that predispose a learner to perceive and approach a situation in a given way define his mental set. A survey of the research on problem solving indicates that an instructor should encourage students to vary strategies in searching for solutions to problems. (NHM)

Study Supported by Grant M-3519 fromn the National Institute of Mental Health, U.S. Public Health Services.

Research supported in part by a Public Health Service Fellowship (MH-6668) and by Grant M-3519 from the National Institute of Mental Health, U.S. Public Health Service.

Cognitive science is a science of intelligence, of knowledge and its uses. Research is psychological theory follows four major themes: Perception, Attention, Memory, and Performance. Only when the range of cognitive mechanisms and functions is known, can possible theoretical approaches characterizing human thought and cognition be distinguished.…

Two perspectives of descriptive research are discussed: first-order, which describes the world as it is; and second-order, which describes the world as people experience it. The latter perspective is known as experiential description. Research in a variety of disciplines, notably the work of Darwin, Werner, and Piaget, has provided experiential…

Principles of concept formation extracted from an extensive review of theoretical and empirical work in psychology, and their relationship to home economics are presented. The present attempts of home economics educators to identify the basic concepts of the field and organize curriculums around them are potentially fruitful, both for students and…

Mentally retarded subjects who could read were tested on their ability to pronounce words and to produce meaningful associates. Analyses of their responses indicated an overuse of a strategy of memorizing words as a way to recognize words in print and an inability to consider word meanings in terms of abstract referents. A comparison of these…

This study investigated whether recall of expository information by a learner will be affected by the mode or combination of modes through which the information is presented. Subjects, 359 fifth-grade students, were randomly stratified into four treatment groups on the basis of sex and reading ability. Treatment for each of the groups was as…

To develop a coherent description of the knowledge and processes involved in skillful word recognition, a study was devised in which 16 adults participated in four related experiments. The purpose of the first experiment was to examine some basic aspects of the processing of words, pseudowords, and nonwords and to discover basic differences in…

Cued-recall and two-alternative, forced-choice recognition measures were used to evaluate subjects' retention of the specific wordings of studied texts. Results obtained after 10-minute and 24 hour retention intervals suggest that the studied wordings of texts are functional components of their memory representations. Theories that assume…

A framework for viewing human text comprehension, memory, and recall is presented that assumes patterns of abstract conceptual relations are used to guide processing. These patterns consist of clusters of knowledge that encode prototypical co-occurrences of situations and events in narrative texts. The patterns are assumed to be a part of a…