A total of 979 subjects from grades four, five, and six of 12 randomly selected urban and nonurban schools in Nigeria were administered an instrument to test their knowledge of 16 scientific concepts. Results showed that the children acquired knowledge incidentally and that the urban children scored higher. (MLH)

Reviews recent research on incidental vocabulary acquisition in second language. Discusses key unresolved issues such as the actual mechanism of incidental acquisition, type and size of vocabulary needed for accurate guessing, degree of exposure to a word needed for successful acquisition, efficacy of different word-guessing strategies, value of…

Reports on a strategy training study that investigated the lexical processing strategies used by second language learners when they encounter unfamiliar vocabulary while reading. Results indicate some lexical processing strategies lead to higher retention rates than others.(Author/VWL)

Ten children and adolescents with severe mental retardation were assigned in matched pairs to either a lexigram augmentative communication condition (graphic symbols) or a control condition (social stimulation). The three subjects who successfully acquired lexigrams also exhibited changes in attention, intentional communication, and sociability.…

Three papers comment on a paper by Abrahamsen et al (EC 212 728) on concomitants of success in acquiring an augmentative communication system (AAC) by persons with severe mental retardation. Comments focus on design and methodological requirements, principles of AAC, and sequence and process in indirect aspects of communicative gains. (DB)

Third semester college students of French viewed part of a film, read part, and then were given a surprise vocabulary test with colloquial words from the text. Their performance, compared to a control group, suggests that incidental vocabulary acquisition is possible in a foreign language situation. The test is appended. (Contains eight…

This study examined Quick Incidental Learning (QUIL) of novel vocabulary by 88 primary school-age children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Among normally developing children, results documented a robust ability to learn words in the early school years. Children with SLI demonstrated significantly less word-learning ability…

Two groups of gifted students in grades 5-8 were taught critical television viewing skills and video production, and a no-treatment group received only video production instruction. Students without critical viewing instruction performed just as well on a posttest of program content analysis but not as well on television form. (Author/JDD)

Begins with a review of research on learning style differences associated with autism, then examines instructional strategies of both behavioral and incidental teaching methods. Using an illustrative case study, it describes how visually cued instruction can be applied with autistic children who are visual learners. (DB)

An experiment was conducted to determine whether tutoring is a learning activity from which the tutor, as well as the tutee, gains cognitively. Undergraduate students (N=80) participated in the study. Half of the subjects studied selected material to tutor another subject. The other half studied material to prepare for a test that they would take.…

The paper reports on an Australian study comparing two methods of teaching a word recognition reading task to eight mildly retarded adolescents. One method involved incidental learning, while the other involved a more structured paired-associate approach. It was found that all eight Ss learned a short list of tool names equally well under either…

The study examined the effects of questions on learning among 90 intermediate level educable mentally retarded children. Four types of learning were identified as relevant remembering, incidental remembering, relevant inferring, and incidental inferring. Results indicated that question position was an important variable in influencing the learning…

This report, the second in a series of six reports on television advertising and children, presents the results from a series of experimental studies designed to test children's intentional and incidental learning from television commercials. A total of 400 elementary school students of varying socioeconomic status participated in the study, with…

The effects of specificity and position of written instructional objectives on learning from an audiotaped lecture were investigated using materials from Rothkopf and Kaplan (1972). Subjects received either specific or general objectives before or after the four sections of the lecture. A control group received no objectives. Vocabulary items used…