This study investigated the potential individual and combinatorial effects of learning strategy training and ability on children's acquisition of new concepts, and considered whether use of the generation of examples strategy would transfer to new concept lessons once the training had been completed. Subjects were 178 sixth grade students who were divided into three groups: (1) explicit training (ET) treatment group, in which subjects were taught to generate their own examples; (2) informed directions (ID) treatment group, in which students were merely directed to make up their own examples of the concepts taught; and (3) no training (NT) treatment group, in which students received no training in or information on strategy use. In addition to training for the first two groups, all three groups took part in transfer sessions designed to test and compare the effects of transfer of the learning strategy training for the two experimental groups with performance by the NT groups. Posttests showed that while the ET group scores were slightly higher than the ID group scores in the training session, there was no statistically significant difference among treatment condition posttest scores. The ET group used the learning strategy in the training session, but showed a significant drop in strategy use during the transfer sessions. The use of learning strategy was minimal by the ID group and almost nonexistent for the NT group. In addition, ability was found to correlate significantly with performance, but no significant difference was found in strategy use between high and low ability students. The text is supplemented by five tables and one figure. (57 references) (EW)