A series of experiments investigated the role of prior knowledge in tasks involving the operation of equipment from written instructions. The experiments covered two situations. In the first, the prior knowledge was already possessed by the subjects before the experiments. The studies involved comprehension and memory of technical prose, expertise…

Identifying the variables which influence student attitudes, perceptions, and behavior patterns in regard to religion, sex, and alcohol has been a major source of investigation. To determine the dimensions underlying the relationship among religion, sex, alcohol use, and alcohol knowledge among university students, 376 University of Maryland…

Based on a preliminary version of this study, project aims were to learn what college freshmen knew about presidents in office from the late 19th century to the present and to determine the students' writing levels. During the first class of each of five semesters, students enrolled in an American History Since 1985 course were asked to write one…

Recent research has suggested that children acquire important knowledge and attitudes about drugs early in their development. To explore the extent of preschoolers' knowledge of alcoholic beverages, two studies were conducted. In the first study, 20 children, 10 from families with alcoholic fathers and 10 controls, participated in Piagetian-like…

A cross-sectional sample of 704 adults was interviewed in a study examining the processes that relate demographic predictors to media use and effects. It was hypothesized that primary groups influence what an individual should attend to and know about public affairs, and that the individual perceives the primary group to "prescribe" the…

This article describes the following case: Pete Wilmington, Vice President of Sales for See-Saw Jeans for Kids, has wrapped up a deal with Wal-Mart to carry See-Saw Jeans for Kids in all Wal-Mart stores on a trial basis for the next year. See-Saw Jeans for Kids is a clothing manufacturer with sales of $41 million, but the Wal-Mart account has the…

A telephone survey of 206 adults was conducted to test hypotheses concerning past information seeking, source preference, and media consumption. Subjects who had obtained information from "expert" institutional sources were found to have greater drug knowledge and interpersonal communication experience. Higher Print consumers had greater knowledge…

This interim evaluation report of the St. Louis, Missouri Urban Consumer Education Project assesses program effectiveness in terms of teacher training and teacher knowledge of consumer basics, community resource participation, and student and teacher knowledge. The project was designed to teach fifth grade students their rights and…

Based on the premise that the quality of domain-specific knowledge is the main determinant of expertise in that domain, an examination was made of the shift from considering general, domain-independent skills and procedures, in both cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence, to the study of the knowledge base. Empirical findings and…

The Wisconsin Nutrition Education and Training Program (NET) developed a test that would provide an adequate measure of the effect of the Wisconsin NET program on student knowledge. The teacher knowledge test was developed and used for baseline collection data. The student knowledge test was developed from the same general behavioral objectives as…

Given the expectation of education personnel that parents should be passive participants in the educational planning process and given the historical lack of access to information experienced by many culturally diverse parents, an attempt was made to ascertain the knowledge level of 13 Black parents with handicapped children with regard to…

By 1960 there was a strongly developed theory of learning in which learning was considered as change of behavior. Neobehaviorist theories and then formal stochastic models analyzed processes in which probabilities of responses are altered. In the 1960's, analysis of learning as a discrete change between states of knowledge or stages of processing…

Interviews with 548 heads of household randomly selected from the Columbus, Ohio, telephone directory provided data on the subjects' political knowledge, news information sources (television, newspapers), and educational level. These data supported three of five hypotheses about the relation between knowledge level and media dependence. There was…

Two main purposes of this study were (1) to determine knowledges and abilities needed to perform professional activities in large public libraries and (2) to determine th degree to which existing library education develops those knowledges and abilities. Using data collected from librarians in thirteen large public libraries and faculty in twelve…

Forty-four employees of the General Extension Division of the Nebraska Agricultural Extension Service and 119 Agricultural Extension employees of the University of Nebraska comprised the population of this study comparing personnel's knowledge of Agricultural Extension and General Extension programs and differences in knowledge of programs…