The literature on the measurement of working memory is discussed, with emphasis on the validity of such measurement with elementary school students. Approaches by J. Pascual-Leone, R. Case, A. D. Baddeley, and C. Hulme are considered. An experimental study is presented, in which 100 boys and 91 girls (aged from 6 years to 10 years 11 months) were…

A study followed up on 75 dyslexic young adults who had been referred to the Word-Blind Centre in London, England to examine remedial help received, present level of skill, educational record, achieved occupational status, and coping strategies. Subjects, 68 men and 7 women ranging in age from 18 to 30 years, were interviewed for two hours…

This paper discusses the incorporation of heuristics in computerized decision aids that are used for structuring decision problems. Decision theory is described in terms of linked subsystems, and sites where it is necessary to employ heuristic rather than normative, algorithmic procedures are identified. Production systems are then used to…

This paper reports the results of an evaluation of a didactic-experiential program designed to improve memory functioning in healthy older adults with memory complaints, and to allay their concerns (in this case, largely unfounded) about the decline of their memory. The 7-week workshop met weekly for 2 hours, each session consisting of a lecture…

A common error in children's attempts to solve verbal analogies is to respond with a word strongly associated with the third term in the analogy. This is known as associative response. A study was conducted to investigate the cognitive processes underlying this response. Subjects, 112 fifth grade students, were administered a battery of tests…

The influence of two sources of individual differences in acquiring knowledge from maps was studied: abilities and learning procedures. Twenty-five undergraduate students provided verbal protocols while attempting to learn two maps, and six effective learning procedures were identified: partitioning, imagery, memory-directed sampling, pattern…

Although the use of animated visuals is both common and popular among computer based instruction (CBI) designers, the theoretical and empirical foundation for their use have not been firmly established. Animated visuals represent a subset of instructional visuals, not a distinctive set. For this reason, general conclusions from research on static…

Instructors who accept responsibility for improving the spelling of their students, must, to be successful, turn that responsibility over to the students. Abjuring their position as rule givers, effective spelling teachers encourage students to pursue their study inductively by exploring the relationship of the spoken language to the written form,…

The study sought to determine whether children with unilateral cerebral lesions sustained either prenatally or postnatally suffer from deficts in learning and memory skills and whether these differentiate left-sided from right-sided lesions. The subjects, 69 children ranging in age from 6 to 17 were divided into four patient groups: hemoplegic Ss…

The effects of age, sex, and curriculum upon the cognitive performance of 20 college students and 20 college-educated elderly individuals were examined. Young adult participants (M=20.55) and elderly participants (M=67.85) were given a battery of formal operational tasks, a measure of field independence/field dependence, a short-term memory…

The effectiveness of the use of self-reported imagery strategies on children's subsequent memory performance was studied, and the coding redundancy hypothesis that memory is facilitated by using an encoding procedure in both words and images was tested. The two levels of reported memory strategy (imagize, verbalize) were crossed with "think…

As an aid to increasing teacher effectiveness, this paper outlines findings derived from the field of cognitive psychology on the way in which memory operates, provides examples, and suggests a variety of ways the information can be applied in teaching. Among the findings cited are the following: (1) some types of information can be encoded (i.e.,…

A method for measuring recognition memory (free of distractors) and false recognition was based on the assumption that the subject was "honest." A distractor-free test of word recognition (a single-item test trial in which the 36 targets were presented prior to the 36 distractors) was compared with a traditional target-distractor…

Very little is known about the conditions under which young children acquire strategic means of remembering in natural learning environments. A promising line of research attributes the emergence of "internal remembering strategies" to formal schooling environments. Data gathered from 173 children in kindergarten through the third grade…

Traditionally, the treatment of geriatric patients suffering from Organic Brain Syndrome (OBS) has been characterized by non-therapeutic custodial care. To determine whether elderly clients with dementia can benefit from self-care skill training, and to compare their progress with clients without OBS, 30 clients of the Residential Aging Program in…