This paper reports two experiments investigating the effect of schooling and urbanization on short term recall and recognition memory. Subjects were 384 male children and young adults living in Morocco representing urban and rural and schooled and nonschooled backgrounds. Additional subject groups--including Koranic school students, Moroccan rug…

Standardized reading tests exert a great influence on curriculum materials, teaching methods, and student perceptions of the nature of reading; these tests must reflect the best recent research findings. Passage dependency research has attempted to increase the accuracy of reading tests, and has focused on the following four areas: (1) reading…

The purpose of this paper is to show teachers that composing is the conveying of "knowing" and that students' growth in writing is frequently stunted by teachers' stress on correct spelling, word choice, and syntax in student writing. Topics discussed in the paper include the following: the presence of "memories and experiences, cinemas, radio…

The three papers in this book treat the experimental literature on eye movements in reading and information processing to determine what factors might be manipulated to improve reading efficiency. The first paper discusses control models of eye activity in reading, research data concerning eye activity with reading material, and future directions…

Lev Vygotsky, in his book "Thought and Language," explores the relationship between thought and language. In school, children discover that there is a code (writing) that represents words. Writing is often difficult for students because it is an abstraction in which words are replaced by images of words, it is speech without an…

This study examined the ability of junior high school students to use advance information when making semantic category decisions. The subjects, eight good readers and eight poor readers, identified paired words as "same" or "different" in category, with some words more highly associated with the category than others--in the "fruit" category, for…

The articles in this publication consider the way in which freshman English students can gain insights into both the reading of literature and the workings of the mind by discussing and writing about their dreams; the function of names in Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"; folklore and…

Subjects were 96 college students who were assigned to eight experimental groups. Five groups took notes during or after listening to segments of a 16-minute tape-recorded lecture. Note-takers reviewed their notes during a 10-minute review session provided all subjects immediately prior to a 20-minute free recall test given 48 hours after lecture…

This study investigated the effects of color cues as well as the absence of such cues on the recognition of visual images using as subjects 28 college students in a basic communications course. The stimulus materials were slides in three categories: (1) original color (realistic), (2) black and white, and (3) non-realistic color format. Subjects…

The study examined: (1) whether children from different ethnic backgrounds structure their inquiry into social problems along different lines and (2) whether these children have different value orientations at various age levels. The sample consisted of children, ages 7 to 12 years, from three groups: (1) American--no foreign language spoken…

Morse code signals were presented dichotically to Morse code operators and to naive subjects with no knowledge of Morse code. The operators showed right ear superiority, indicating left hemisphere dominance for the perception of dichotically presented Morse code letters. Naive subjects showed the same right ear superiority when presented with a…

This report gives an account of the Swedish part of an international transfer project with the aim of adapting teacher training systems based on microteaching for use in member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. An American minicourse, "Effective Questioning," was adapted to and tested for Swedish teacher…

Two experiments which investigated the young child's ability to deal with multiplicative classes and relations (considered behavioral indices of concrete operations thought) in double series and cross class matrices are described and discussed. In the initial study, 160 children from preschool through grade 2 received six matrix subtasks…

This paper argues that a major aspect of intelligence is the ability to solve problems and that careful analysis of problem-solving behavior is a means of specifying many of the psychological processes that make up intelligence. The focus is on the mechanisms involved when, in the absence of complete instruction, a person must "invent" a new…

The purpose of this project was to make a preliminary investigation of the processes of second language acquisition by children, adolescents and adults, and to develop a methodology appropriate to the study of second language learning. In the development of the methodology, applicable techniques from first language acquisition research were…