Phonological awareness, phonological memory, and phonological access to lexical storage play important roles in acquiring literacy. We examined the convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of these phonological processing abilities (PPA) in 389 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the validity of each…

According to Herbert F. Spitzer, an ambitious graduate student, immediate recall in the form of a test is an effective method of aiding the retention of learning and should, therefore, be employed more frequently in the elementary school. Suggestions like Mr. Spitzer's have been made for many decades, but they have never gained much traction. Now,…

In this article, the author presents an innovative approach to teaching multiplication facts for children in middle school or younger. After introducing the dangers of some contradictions that persist, relating a brief summary of related research and guidelines regarding math facts and their relation to strategic approaches to more complex math,…

This article presents three studies that investigate when syntactic constraints become available during the processing of long-distance backwards pronominal dependencies ("backwards anaphora" or "cataphora"). Earlier work demonstrated that in such structures the parser initiates an active search for an antecedent for a pronoun, leading to gender…

Despite the importance of good lecture notes to test performance, very little is known about the cognitive processes that underlie effective lecture note taking. The primary purpose of the 2 studies reported (a pilot study and Study 1) was to investigate 3 processes hypothesized to be significantly related to quality of notes: transcription…

This paper examines the cognitive processes associated with higher-order thinking strategies--i.e., cognitive processes directly associated with the employment of knowledge in the service of problem solving and creativity--in order to more clearly define a prescribed instructional method to improve problem-solving skills. The first section of the…

Retarded subjects were compared with mental- and chronological-age matched controls on serial short-term memory (STM) tasks. Retarded subjects were inferior to the control groups on both primacy and recency items, under two recall conditions. These data are discussed in relation to possible mechanisms underlying IQ-related individual differences…

This study examined the utility of Wechsler's Deterioration Index, which compares short- and long-term memory capabilities. Three studies with a total of 120 children (ages 6-14) found that the index did not predict learning disability status but did distinguish children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder from nondisabled children.…

This study formulated and tested a mathematical model to predict learning in which the amount of correct information recalled from an audio learning task is a function of the rate of oral communication. (Contains 36 references.) (MDH)

Background: Children who meet language test criteria for specific language impairment (SLI) are not necessarily the same as those who are referred to a speech and language therapist. Aims: To consider how far this discrepancy reflects insensitivity of traditional language tests to clinically important features of language impairment. Methods &…

Purpose: A national quality report card for nursing homes, Nursing Home Compare, has been published since 2002. It has been shown to have some, albeit limited, positive impact on quality of care. The objective of this study was to test empirically the hypothesis that nursing homes have responded to the publication of the report by adopting cream…

A framework is proposed in which on-line activities occurring during comprehension are explicitly tied to the memory representation of a story. The framework, referred to as the "landscape" framework, is used to implement a process model that assumes that readers attempt to explain story events in terms of their causal antecedents. An…

This study examined the effects of misleading information on children's memory for a real-life event. In play sessions involving an experimenter, 36 6-year-olds and 36 9-year-olds individually participated by playing games with a research assistant. In the sessions, six critical items were present: two items identified the room; two identified the…

Non-verbal recall of haptically presented spatial positions by three age groups of blind and sighted children was tested under conditions varying cuing, recall type and stimulus position in a within-subject design. (Editor)

The 90 individually run subjects learned and were tested for their free recall of a conceptually unrelated hierarchy of words, a randomly arranged, or a properly arranged conceptual hierarchy, under instructions to process the words either by generating hierarchical associations among them or by copying them. (Editor)