A study examined whether the reading comprehension of students with rich domain-specific knowledge will be better than that of students without it and whether assessed general skills will be correlated significantly with reading comprehension performance for students without specific knowledge, but negligible for the students with much specific…

The first chapter of this publication, which focuses on a new definition and integration of thinking skills in the curriculum, presents a model that unifies current research and theory with a new understanding of the traditional notion of content and with a different approach to instruction. The model proposed in this chapter synthesizes recent…

Age-related improvement of mnemonic performances of children has attracted many investigators wishing to determine developmental mechanisms which might produce this improvement. Potential explanations have been subsumed under three major categories: capacity, strategies, and knowledge structures. The present investigation, in focusing on…

F. C. Bartlett's concept of "attitude" is used in this paper as a point of departure for the creation of a model of the complementary functioning of discursive and experiential memorial representation. The paper first discusses several of the memorial functions of experiential representation, in particular the integrative function…

The series of experiments reported here investigated dimensions of children's sex stereotypes. The first study revealed that children were aware of sex stereotypes as early as 2 1/2 years of age. Furthermore, the tendency to categorize according to sex increased through their eighth year. The second study investigated whether sex stereotypes…

A study was conducted to explore the generality of reconstructive processes of memory for social information. Sixty college students divided evenly into six experimental and control groups were asked to read one of two versions of a story: one in which a couple happily agreed not to have children, the other in which the man's desire to remain…

Two experiments compared the effectiveness of two separate mnemonic devices for learning the states and their capitals--one a complex key word system using substitute words for each syllable, the other a simple key word device interacting key words from the state and capital names in an illustration. In the first experiment, 88 fourth and fifth…

Information-processing students solving problems in the 1960s and 1970s accepted the tradition of early experimental psychology in concentrating primarily on the study of "knowledge-lean" tasks in which competence can usually be acquired over short periods of learning and experience. In recent years, experts have examined knowledge-rich…

A series of experiments investigated the role of prior knowledge in tasks involving the operation of equipment from written instructions. The experiments covered two situations. In the first, the prior knowledge was already possessed by the subjects before the experiments. The studies involved comprehension and memory of technical prose, expertise…

Case's cognitive developmental theory was used in an investigation of unconstrained drawings by children 4, 6, 8, and 10 years of age. The objectives were: (1) to look for qualitative changes in drawing at these ages, (2) to relate whatever changes were found to qualitative changes in other tasks during the same period, and (3) to test whether a…

Previous studies of the effect of age and modality on digit span task performance have yielded inconsistent results. To eliminate some of the methodological difficulties in prior research, 18 college students and 18 older adults were given the digit span task by means of three different modalities: (1) visual successive; (2) visual simultaneous;…

Results from three studies involving college, third grade, and kindergarten subjects, suggest that individuals across a wide age range are able to use the visual properties of a stimulus for only a very brief period as the basis for making matched judgments. (Author/SDH)

Free-recall (FR) instructions produce substantially different patterns of retention than serial recall (SR) instructions. In the present experiments an effort was made to determine to what extent two factors contribute to the dissimilarities between FR and SR. (Author/RK)

Three experiments are reported, all directed to the question of whether vicalization at presentation affects primary memory (PM) rather than secondary memory (SM). (Editor)