Five experiments with 586 college students investigated how ability differences, learning task characteristics, and motivational and volitional processes combine to explain performance differences in an associative memory or substitution task. Results are discussed in terms of developing a more comprehensive understanding of learner differences.…

Forty-four university students, of whom 11 had learning disabilities (LD), were tested on tasks requiring multisyllabic pseudoword repetition, oral reading, memory for digits, and vocabulary. In both LD and non-LD groups, significant correlations were found between pseudoword repetition accuracy and reading, suggesting that poor readers also have…

The effectiveness of coaching active reasoning of students with learning disabilities was studied with 63 grade 4 and 5 students. Students in the coaching condition outperformed students in the two comparison conditions on immediate and one-week delayed tests of factual information and explanations. (Author/SW)

Discusses the relevant educational implications of action psychology. Two topics discussed include the relationship between activity and memory and the conditions for the personal integration of knowledge--the cognitive and affective aspects of vocabulary acquisition as they are relevant to foreign language vocabulary acquisition. (60 references)…

Examined developmental changes in the use of distance-based and calendar-based approaches to estimate the recency of two events. Found that children's ability to discriminate temporal relationships between two events appears by four to five years of age. In contrast, use of calendar information and cognizance of annual patterns was found only in…

The ability of 2 components, interpretation of a question and memory, to forecast the test-retest association coefficients of reading test items was studied with initial samples of 916 elementary and 949 secondary school students. For both populations, both components forecast the relative sizes of test-retest correlation coefficients. (SLD)

This study analyzed four characteristics of political commercials to determine their impact on television viewers' reactions: (1) issue versus image strategies; (2) attack versus support appeals; (3) presence and absence of music; and (4) visual content, either with families or in professional campaign settings. Memory measures and attitudes are…

Illustrated vignettes, some containing an ambiguous reference to the illustration, were presented to kindergartners and second and fourth graders. Variations in presentation tested the effects of question sequence, of delay between ambiguous reference and interrogation, and of the complication of the illustration on children's ability to detect…

This study examined the contributions of phonological awareness, rapid naming, and verbal memory to the reading and spelling skills of 54 children (ages 7-12) with severe reading disabilities. Five academic tasks were examined: word attack, word identification, spelling, prose passage speed and accuracy, and reading comprehension. (Author/JDD)

Reports on an experiment in which 46 undergraduates at Indiana University were exposed to television and newspaper stories, tested for factual recall, and retested after 2 days thinking time. Results indicate an improvement in recall over time (hypermnesia) that was more pronounced for visual images. (42 references) (EA)

This essay concerns feminist fiction by Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, and Toni Morrison that utilizes memory as a means to liberation and explores this at the level of narrative form. In examining 1970s feminist fiction and metafiction, explores the importance of memory at particular cultural moments. (AF)

Reviews the major contributions of Alfred Binet. Explains why the fame of the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale was so long lasting whereas that of his other contributions was so fleeting. Discusses implications of his contributions for current efforts to formulate unified theories of cognition and cognitive development. (Author/GLR)

The relationship between elementary operations underlying processing of numerical information and performance on psychometrically derived ability measures requiring processing of numbers but defining separate ability factors was studied for 102 Air Force recruits (54 males and 48 females). Patterns of convergent and discriminate relationships for…

Reviews selected instructional procedures in the four reading readiness skills that can be taught and learned: auditory discrimination, auditory comprehension, visual discrimination, and visual memory. Stresses that readiness skills are prerequisite to reading skills. (RS)

Learning-disabled and average readers (n=120) from grades four through six completed comprehension questions under one of four treatment conditions. Results indicated that computer-mediated text was no better than off-line conditions in improving learning-disabled readers' comprehension. Attribution and metacognitive sophistication were…