The effects of four methods of immediate corrective feedback delivered by computer within a question-based concept and rule learning setting were investigated in this study. A second purpose of the study was to probe the complex relationship between types of corrective feedback and the types of errors made by learners. One hundred and fifty-three…

An attempt was made to document the beginning of children's ability to make cognitive-emotional discriminations between skill-dependent outcomes and chance-dependent outcomes of performance on tasks. Children between the ages of 2 and 5 years were administered structurally similar achievement games and effect games. It was thought that as soon as…

Presents a study of paired-associative learning involving a total of 80 preschool and second grade children. Four familiarization categories of pretraining were utilized; results are discussed in terms of the effects of pretraining conditions and age on paired-associative learning and their consistency with some developmental hypotheses and phase…

TO STUDY THE EFFECTS OF OVERTRAINING ON REVERSAL AND NONREVERSAL SHIFTS OF CUES, 96 NORMAL (MEAN AGE = 117 MONTHS, MEAN IQ = 109.8) AND 96 RETARDED CHILDREN (MEAN AGE = 119 MONTHS, MEAN IQ = 70.1) WERE TESTED ON A SIMULTANEOUS 2-CHOICE DISCRIMINATION TASK. SUBJECTS WERE TRAINED ON TWO LEVELS (CRITERION AND OVERTRAINING). FOLLOWING TRAINING ON THE…

Research on learning and conditioning suggests that verbal response modification does not occur in the absence of the subject's ability to define verbally (1) the response-reinforcement relationships and (2) his intention to change his behavior in the direction of reinforcement. This seems to be true for operant conditioning of verbal behavior,…

Previous experiments with nursery school children have suggested that (1) subjects of preschool age do not verbalize during transfer learning or that (2) for these subjects, self-produced verbal cues have little influence on the learning process. To investigate the relative merits of these alternative positions, research was conducted among 80…

Retardates, primary students, and college students were given either a reversal or an intradimensional shift after either a criterion of five or twenty correct on a pre-transfer problem. An automated two-choice apparatus projected planometric color and form cues from the rear onto panels that the subject was instructed to press. Both the…

This paper illustrates the interplay between laboratory research on feedback and development of instructional materials. Exploratory work suggests that the products of behavior or "product feedback," are functionally different from differential reinforcement. Product feedback provides the means by which self-correction can take place; differential…

A review of the literature indicated that conventional tests are inadequate for accurate assessment of phonological discrimination ability in children. Higher error rates on discrimination tests than those which would be predicted from articulation measures seemed to implicate task variables. To reduce task difficulty, repeated contrast test…

One hundred and eight kindergarten and elementary school children, 36 at each of three age levels (5, 7, and 9 years) participated in the experiment. All children were presented a three-part successive discrimination task; original learning, presentation of incidental stimuli, and a test of recongition and recall of the incidental material.…

Experiments conducted to find ways of teaching two and three year olds mathematical concepts were found to have general implications for concept learning. The failure of an initial attempt to teach the concepts "fat" and "skinny" led to a design of instructional procedures that would utilize a concept's name while trying to teach its semantic…

This study investigated the spontaneous use of verbal mediators in discrimination learning, the transfer of mediators to a free recall task, and the effects of a pretraining task on performance. The discrimination tasks required nursery school children (80) to: (1) sort three instances each of two different concepts in a conceptually consistent…

A nursery school teacher received three types of training in self-observation skills, which were compared with regard to their effects on the accuracy of the self-observations. Minimal training consisted of a brief description of the behaviors to be recorded. The feedback condition incorporated daily information about the accuracy of the…

A course which is an introduction to music emphasizing modes and forms is outlined. Objectives include: (1) The student will select the title of a familiar melody from a list provided; (2) The student will identify by ear the performing medium from the following choices: violin, voice, piano, guitar, clarinet, trombone, organ, string bass,…

Three experiments tested the application to art of an hypothesis from the concept attainment literature, that conceptual learning is enhanced by providing multiple examples prior to test trials. Subjects were given discrimination tasks involving surrealistic and non-surrealistic paintings. The feature abstraction model proved inadequate in this…