Investigates expository text macroprocessing and its relationship to working memory and school achievement by using a hierarchy-rating test. Indicates that the ability to identify expository text topics and main points are connected to Working Memory (WM). Finds that hierarchy-rating and multiple-choice task are strongly related to school…

Two studies examined efficacy of context reinstatement in enhancing 5- to 7-year olds' recall. Results showed that children exposed to a context reminder 24 hours before the six-month interview and children interviewed in the event context did not differ but reported significantly more information than children in standard interview. (Author/KB)

Examined sources of parents' and 2- to 6-year olds' discordant recall of events evoking various children's emotions. Found that children agreed with parents' emotion attributions most often for events parents recalled as evoking happiness and sadness, less for fear, and least for anger. Discord related to differences in attribution of children's…

Examined effects of misleading or inconsistent post-event information on 7-year olds' recollections. Misinformation was administered on one or three occasions two days after learning a target game. Found that three weeks later, even criterion-learned information could be affected detrimentally by misinformation exposure. Children given…

Discusses work by Arthur Jensen in addition to his well-known work on the genetics of intelligence. Includes studies of learning, memory, the cumulative-deficit hypothesis, Spearman's hypothesis, and the speed of information processing. (SLD)

Finds that explicit anaphors only reactivated undergraduate students' target antecedents when they are both lexically and conceptually identical to a target antecedent; but as distance between an anaphor and its antecedent increased, even an explicit anaphor did not reactivate a target antecedent. Shows that distant antecedents were reactivated…

This study compared 19 students with learning disabilities (LD) in grades 6 and 8 with their nondisabled peers on the free recall of science passages when differences in passage understanding and domain vocabulary were controlled. Results suggested that the poorer performance of LD students might be the result of the inability to understand and…

Article aims to draw a balanced conclusion about trauma and memory from current information on repressed memories. Research suggests that (1) emotion impacts memory, (2) psychogenic amnesia can result from unusual levels of trauma, and (3) delayed memories are prone to errors. Inaccuracies in traumatic memories occur more often in peripheral…

Examined the influence of working memory on the off-line and real-time sentence comprehension/ processing of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Twelve children with SLI, 12 normally developing children matched for chronological age (CA), and 12 children matched for receptive syntax completed three tasks. Suggests that SLI children…

Seeks to rehearse E. Havelock's arguments about relationships among communication modes or media, memory, and social-political change to specify his primary contributions to the so-called orality-literacy theorems, or to what is now beginning to be called theories of media ecology. Describes Havelock's evolutionary journey from the late 1950s to…

Studies the relationship between working memory capacity and reading comprehension in fourth-grade children and the nature of the working memory resources involved in reading comprehension. Shows that working memory capacity was a direct predictor of reading comprehension when contrasted with vocabulary and decoding skills. Discusses the reasons…

Examines representatives of the story cycle genre--Louise Erdrich's "Love Medicine" and Gloria Naylor's "The Women of Brewster Place." Examines a revisionary episode from each text to situate story cycles in a frame that embraces both Western and non-Western traditions. Suggests that scholars, teachers, and students see and…

Three standardized measures of short-term memory (STM) were compared to determine their relative efficacy in predicting reading achievement for 36 primary-grade students over a two-year period. A letter sequences test was found to be the most frequently associated with reading performance. A memory-for-sentences task also showed a significant…

First graders at risk for handwriting problems (n=144) were assigned to 1 of 6 treatment conditions, including handwriting instruction and phonological awareness training. Converging evidence across multiple measures shows that combining numbered arrows and memory retrieval was the most effective treatment for improving both handwriting and…

Two studies involving approximately 200 children aged 4 to 12 years show the expected increases in the level of cognitive competencies but show that these increases are not universal. Large inter- and intraindividual differences are found for various types of memory tasks as well as for different domains of scholastic achievement. (SLD)