Thirty-two fourth grade students were divided into two equal-sized groups according to reading ability. Each student read and recalled four passages from fourth-grade texts. The passages were either an original version, a semantic simplification, a syntactic simplification, or a combined rewrite. One week later, each child read and recalled…

Thirty-six undergraduate students participated in a two-hour experiment that measured the effect of fact and inference text annotation on the integration of information. The subjects were asked to read four pairs of meaningful stories, each of which contained four pairs of related facts about a mythical country. The texts of the experimental group…

The study involving 60 learning disabled (LD) children (7-10 years old) was designed to determine if LD children go beyond the given information when trying to understand and remember sentences, i.e., do they spontaneously construct inferential relationships like adults and other children, or do they attend to and rehearse individual sentences of…

Glass and Holyoak (1975) have raised two issues related to the distinction between set-theoretic and network theories of semantic memory, contending that: (a) their version of a network theory, the Marker Search model, is conceptually and empirically superior to the Feature Comparison model version of a set-theoretic theory; and (b) the contrast…

A fundamental fact of the analysis of variance statistical procedure is that if the omnibus F test of an effect is significant, then there exists at least one contrast of that effect that will be significantly different from zero according to the S-method of Scheffe. The caveat to this rule is that the significant contrast(s) may not be of any…

This monograph, the sixth in a series on the development of the reading process, is concerned with the development of reading comprehension. In the first chapter, "Comprehension in Listening and Reading: Same or Different," Joseph H. Danks analyzes the evidence for the proposition that tbe comprehension processes for language in print and language…

A research project investigated the process of reading comprehension through which the reader generates a semantic representation of the message conveyed by a text. The first focus of the project was an examination of the functioning of abstract knowledge in text comprehension. Studies were conducted to explore the activation of proposition…

Training older persons to use memory strategies and mnemonic techniques derived from an information processing model of memory has resulted in improvements in performance on specific tasks. Some studies have also shown that the elderly are less likely to use memory techniques than younger persons and that it is the use of techniques that best…

This study investigates the hypothesis that during adolescence the developmental increase in the tendency to use elaboration as an associative study strategy is explained by increases in metamemorial knowledge. Independent assessments of the metamemorial knowledge and spontaneous strategic behavior of 32 fifth- and 32 twelfth-grade subjects were…

This position paper is an extension of a presentation delivered to the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics at their annual meetings in San Diego, 1978. Four limits in test design are discussed: focus on low-level skills, general adherence to randomness, filling in blanks, and right…

Three studies investigating the emergence and early refinement of intelligent self-correction are described. Forty-one children ranging in age from 18 to 30 months served as subjects. Parents taught their children a hide-and-seek game in which the parent hid a toy in natural locations in the home while the child watched. After a 3- or 5-minute…

Four types of sentences differing in grammaticalness and amount of association between component words were presented to 80 educable mentally retarded children for recall after varying delay intervals. The children (all male and between the ages of nine and 14) sat quietly during the delay intervals of named numbers from a memory drum. The results…

This investigation examined in the laboratory the type of learning commonly found in the school situation--the formalized acquisition of concepts. A verbal concept-learning task suitable for college students was devised which permitted the externalizing and quantifying of behavior at 6 points in the learning process. A pilot study evaluated the…

In this study, developmental changes in duration of the icon (visual sensory store) were investigated with three converging tachistoscopic tasks. (1) Stimulus interuption detection (SID), a variation of the two-flash threshold method, was performed by 29 first- and 32 fifth-graders, and 32 undergraduates. Icon duration was estimated by stimulus…

In this paper, Simon describes contemporary information processing approaches to the study of learning and thinking, and discusses the relevance of these studies to the distinction between rote and meaningful learning. Before defining the basic terminology of information processing research, he provides a brief literature review, describing some…