Disadvantaged preschool children directed in the role-enactment of imaginary stories were found to be superior to control children (who did not engage in role playing) on several measures of social and cognitive development. Fantasy play training resulted in a higher incidence of spontaneous sociodramatic play, higher scores on an interpersonal…

A large battery of various tests of intelligence, scholastic achievement, and short-term memory was administered to some 2,000 white, black, and Mexican American pupils in grades 4, 5, and 6 in a largely agricultural school district in the central valley of California; the 3 grades were used as separate replications. Factor analysis with oblique…

This report contains four papers describing research based on the view of mathematical knowledge as a hierarchy of "rules." The first paper: "The Role of Rules in Behavior" was abstracted in ED 040 036 (October 1970). The second paper: "A Theory of Mathematical Knowledge" defends the thesis that rules are the basic building blocks of mathematical…

Previous research has indicated that for discretely (paired associate) as well as continuously (sound-film) presented information, high arousal during acquisition results in poor immediate recall, but is characterized by a strong reminiscence effect. Low arousal learning results in better immediate recall with poor retention. The hypothesis that…

This research project investigated some of the characteristics of primary and secondary memory. In the primary research, subjects were given a list of words followed by an interpolated task. The data of interest were the recall for terminal items in the list. Using this procedure, the researchers have demonstrated negative recency in initial…

This paper, presented at the 1973 meeting of the American Education Research Association, discusses some of the studies conducted in the area of learning from prose. The first study dealt with pooling independent sentences into groups of related sentences and preparing passages by stringing these sentences together. College students then read one…

The present study explored the effects of complex relational sentences upon the acquisition and recall of surrounding material in immediate and long-term memory. The study also investigated the effects of an immediate prompted recall test upon long-term retention, and the recallability of different types of content. Reading time (subject-paced; 16…

This collection of papers represents the proceedings of a research workshop on coding processes in human memory held in Massachusetts in August, 1971. The emphasis is on the contemporary issue of coding and particularly on the encoding processes at the time information is stored in memory. This volume is intended for use by research workers and…

The primary object of this research proposal is to delineate the area of general learning abilities. It differentiates between abilities and skills by defining ability as a general trait which can be inferred from observation of responses consistent across tasks and skill as a proficiency on a specific task or on a limited group of tasks. A review…

A battery of behavioral tests yielding 79 measures, many of which were presumably related to learning and memory, was administered to house mice of seven inbred strains. An analysis of the factorial structure indicated that the two principal and most pervasive factors underlying performance on the battery involved the initiation and maintenance of…

The study paired-associate (PA) learning via the anticipation (ANT) and study-test (ST) procedures across second, third, fourth and fifth grades. Specifically, age differences in the rate of learning and examining PA learning according to the stage analyses were examined. Retention was also of interest: however, a ceiling effect negated the…

The history of basic research in the area of memory development is briefly reviewed as part of an attempt to illustrate how basic research can inform educational practice. The historical overview is supplemented by more detailed consideration of a few prototypical research studies. This is followed by a description of the progress, problems, and…

In two experiments, visual and auditory memory were tested for good and for poor readers from the upper elementary grades. Under experimenter-blind conditions, no reading group differences existed for single-mode presentation in recognition frequency or recognition latency. With a multimodal presentation, latencies for poor readers were similar to…

The effect of variations in the organization of information and in contextual features upon comprehension of prose was tested using four tasks. Organization was varied to contrast hierarchical information structures and list information structures, and to test the effect of linking the structural components of the passage into a conceptual…

This study showed that course-acquired knowledge can apparently be kept fresh over long periods by small amounts of properly spaced review activities. (PCB)