A study examined whether teaching a specific reading strategy could improve the reading comprehension and memory of young (18 to 32) and older (62 and older) high school educated adults with average to high vocabulary test scores. The "plan strategy" was identified through an examination of what more than 1,000 adults wrote down as they…

To determine whether children's knowledge of arithmetic facts becomes increasingly "automatic" with age, 7-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and adults were given a number-matching task for which mental arithmetic should have been irrelevant. Specifically, students were required to verify the presence of a probe number in a previously presented pair (e.g.,…

This article presents information drawn from research on brain processes that impact perception, memory, learning, and understandings about the world. This information is related to the use of interactive video and the Web in distance education through a discussion of how best to enhance learning--or mitigate problems caused--through the use of…

This paper examines the relationship between strategies for recall of verbal material and the reading ability of 10-to-13-year-old children. Sixty-five fifth and sixth graders, whose reading levels were determined by the Gates-MacGinitie Comprehension Test (1964), were given an orally presented word-string repetition task. While performance on…

Three experiments, in which subjects read passages of variable readability, measured "cognitive capacity usage" (the attention level to reading material) by recording by subjects reaction times in a secondary task (responding to a "click"). The data indicated that the easy texts filled cognitive capacity more completely than the difficult texts,…

This report provides a nontechnical summary of a series of studies from a research project with three major foci: memory storage dynamics, memory retrieval dynamics, and coding in semantic memory. A theory of forgetting was developed, involving time and interference factors. Memory traces have two properties: strength and fragility. Consolidation…

The research paper discusses seven experiments concerned with interrelations between memory and judgment. Three major hypotheses were explored: (1) the Independence Hypothesis, which states that one's memory is independent of impression; (2) the Verbal Memory Hypothesis, which maintains that transformation of information that one has in memory at…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 27 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the effect of a crowded or spaced appearance of narrative material on the reading comprehension of above-average and below-average fourth grade students; (2)…

One of a regular series on the status and progress of studies into the nature of speech, instrumentation for its investigation, and practical applications of research, this report covers the period of January 1 to March 31, 1982. The 13 studies deal with the following topics: (1) speech perception and memory coding in relation to reading ability,…

Students in grades 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, and college were timed as they produced the answers to simple addition problems or verified a given problem as true or false. First graders clearly relied on a counting process for their performance, as advanced by the Groen and Parkman "min" (for minimum addend) model. Third grade appears to be a…

Research reports on the nature of speech, instrumentation for the investigation of speech, and practical applications of speech research are included in this status report for the April 1-June 30, 1981, period. The 14 reports deal with the following topics: (1) electromyography as a technique for laryngeal investigation, (2) the phonatory…

An information processing approach was applied to the development and validation of a test battery intended for personnel selection, classification, and guidance; and design of training programs. The approach specifies that test should measure specific cognitive processes and basic abilities, rather than prior experience. Tests should be short,…

To investigate the strategies children use in comprehending written stories, third, sixth, and ninth grade students were given scrambled six-sentence stories and asked to reorder them. Three versions of each of six stories were created. The first version was the canonical form of the story predicted by story grammar rules; the second version began…

THREE GROUPS OF FIRST- AND SECOND-GRADE CHILDREN, TWO LOWER-CLASS AND ONE MIDDLE-CLASS, WERE ASKED TO LEARN AND RECALL SEQUENCES OF WORDS AT FOUR LEVELS OF CONCEPTUAL DIFFICULTY--NONSENSE SYLLABLES, HIGH FREQUENCY NOUNS, ANOMALOUS SENTENCES, AND MEANINGFUL SENTENCES. IT WAS HYPOTHESIZED THAT THE STUDENTS' VERBAL MEMORY WOULD INCREASE WITH…

The purpose of this study was to identify the working memory capacity (M-space) for a group of 139 children (4 to 8 years of age) enrolled at Sandy Bay Infant School in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Four M-space tests -- The Counting Span Test (Case and Kurland, 1978), Mr. Cucui Test (DeAvila and Havassy, 1974), the Digit Placement Test (Case,…