This study compares the effects of Montessori methods of instruction and methods of direct verbal instruction. Montessori methods rely on the ability of the child to learn through physical interaction with inanimate objects and minimize verbal behavior by teacher and student, while the direct verbal method works mainly through language use, both…

A group of 34 subjects each with a reading deficiency of 1 year or more were studied on the following variables: visual perception, arithmetic, memory, auditory perception, and laterality. The age range was from 8 to 13 years, with a mean grade deficiency of 1.93 years. Using the Minnesota Percepto-Diagnostic test as the diagnostic instrument, the…

A rationale was developed for researching reading comprehension based on information gain. Previous definitions of comprehension which were reviewed included operational vs. nonoperational and skills vs. processes. Comprehension was viewed as an informational processing event which includes a constellation of cognitive and learning processes. Two…

The effects of arousal on literal and inferential comprehension of text over short- and long-term retention intervals were studied using 369 elementary school children. Putative arousal manipulations were of two types: expectation and deviations from expectation as established by an advance organizer followed by text that for different…

This paper reports on one study in a research program trying to extend existing findings on elaborative mediation in paired-associate learning into the domain of prose learning. Ten third graders and 22 fourth graders from an inner-city Catholic school served as subjects. A paraphrase recall pretest was administered which involved reading a…

Repeated exposure to tests composed of memory items was compared to repeated exposure to tests including higher-level cognitive items and to tests composed of both item types. Other design factors were sex, ability level, subject matter sequence (science and social studies), and learning session. (A sample of 2008 eleventh-grade students…

This review of literature on children's learning focuses on the following seven subject areas: (1) Infant learning, particularly studies of conditioning and individual differences in infants, (2) New perspectives on Piaget, reviewing studies where conservation and transitive inferences have been taught to young children, (3) Language and…

Two studies examined serial recall process of first-grade Canadian children from inner-city and suburban backgrounds. In the first study significant differences were found in the serial position curve of recall. Suburban children recalled a greater number of early-presented, primacy items, while inner-city children who had equivalent span…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the relationships between individual difference variables and discovery vs. non-discovery instructional treatments in learning of an imaginary science. All subjects were able to learn the material, but presentation of examples and rules (non-discovery) led to more rapid learning. There was no…

Reminiscence, or an increase in retention scores from a short-to-long-term retention test, has been shown in some previous work to be a significant function of arousal. Previous studies of the effects of color versus black-and-white audiovisual presentations have generally used film or television and have found no facilitating effect of color on…

The Benton Visual Retention Test which is designed to assess visual perceptual, visual motor, and visuoconstructive abilities can give school personnel greater precision and range in testing. The standardization of this instrument was tested on 700 Houston elementary school students. Chronological age differences were maintained and correlation…

In a recent study by Shiffrin (1970) where list N was not recalled until after list N+1 had been studied, the length of List N was considered to be a variable that affected forgetting from long-term memory (LTM). However, due to a confounding in Shiffrin's design, recall failures could have been due either to forgetting from LTM or to lack of…

Current transformational linguistic theory holds that there are two levels of sentence structure, derived constituent or surface structure and underlying or deep structure. Both have been proposed as the memory representation of sentences, but recent evidence suggests that the latter is the more likely. However, two recent studies have directly…

Heritability is defined as the proportion of a manifested trait's varience that is due to genetic variation. Sixty-five pairs of twins were employed to investigate the heritability of: (1) short term memory (Jensen's Level 1), operationalized using of modified "digit span" test; (2) the general intellective factor (Jensen's Level II),…

Presented is a curriculum designed to provide the teacher of the young deaf child with learning disabilities with a description of developmental objectives and methods for fulfilling these objectives in the areas of gross motor development, sensory motor integration, visual analysis, attention and memory, and conceptualization. The objectives are…