The reports of eight studies testing the effects of elaboration on the learning of children are compiled in this document. Mental elaboration is "thinking while learning" which occurs as the learner actively adds context to the material he is asked to process. Supplied elaboration, included in these studies, occurs when the learner is provided with elaborative learning aids such as pictures and sentences. Attempts are made to state the differential effects on learning of the two types of elaboration. A model for research on elaboration was presented, and it was hypothesized that children could learn much more rapidly when supplied with contexts or instructed in how to make up their own contexts. The general approach was to test a range of tasks for which imagery or verbal elaboration would be effective. Seven of the studies involved the paired-associate recall of nouns, while the other involved the learning of a finger maze. The most striking finding was that instructing children in mental elaboration (imagery and sentence generation) significantly increased the recall of nouns when compared with rote repetition, and it seems that instructing children in "how to learn" strategies may be appropriate for several school learning tasks. (AJ)