A study involving 31 adults with Down syndrome investigated their ability to reason. Results found they did not differ from typically developing children, matched on expressive and verbal ability, in transitivity and non-verbal analogical thinking; however, they did differ in categorical reasoning, classical verbal analogies, and short-term…

Examines phonological recoding in reading by highly skilled English and French bilinguals. In general, slow second-language (L2) readers were not more dependant upon phonological recoding than L2 readers, L2 presented a heavier working memory processing load for slow readers, and different phonological effects existed for French and for English.…

Uses a survey to determine how adult, adolescent, and elementary age students remember what they read. Finds that, for all three groups studied, adjunct (during reading) strategies were reported as being used more often than pre- and posttype strategies. Finds that adolescent readers believed teachers taught them to remember, but adults believe…

To determine variations in cognitive characteristics, 10 nonretarded men with infantile autism, residual state, were compared with 15 severely dyslexic men and 25 controls on a neuropsychological test battery. The dyslexics showed a reduced digit span and the autistic group exhibited impaired problem-solving skills. (Author/JDD)

Discusses concept of time in therapy, presenting theoretical and clinical foundations to illustrate the validity of guiding patients into past lives and future lifetimes through hypnosis to resolve self-defeating sequences. (Author/TE)

Provides suggestions for note-taking from books, lectures, visual presentations, and laboratory experiments to enhance student knowledge, memory, and length of attention span during instruction. Describes topical and structural outlines, visual mapping, charting, three-column note-taking, and concept mapping. Benefits and application of…

Seven educational states or processes which are popularly deemed vices are discussed, and the argument is presented that, when properly qualified, they are valuable educational goods to be wisely promoted or exploited by the sensitive teacher. These seven are: ignorance, negativity, forgetting, guesswork, irrelevance, procrastination, and…

The study of differences between 12 subjects with learning disabilities and 12 without, across 3 grade levels (intermediate, junior high, and senior high) and 2 story grammar tasks, found no developmental differences between disabled and nondisabled groups but did find significant differences in the amount and type of information recalled. (DB)

Identifies and summarizes important research in modern cognitive psychology that has implications for the design of computer drill and practice programs in education. Highlights include automaticity of subskills; interference present in a learning task; spacing of practice sessions; spaced review; capacity of short-term memory; and representation…

Analysis of the performance of beginning American Sign Language students, who had only recently learned the manual alphabet, on a task in which proactive interference would build up rapidly on successive trials, supported the view that different languages have separate memory stores. (Author/CB)

Thirty learning-disabled students in grades five-eight read several passages and attempted to identify and remember main ideas. Students were assigned to one to three conditions: control, monitoring and self-questioning, or mnemonic. The monitoring strategy was most effective for main-idea finding, whereas the mnemonic strategy was most effective…

The study found that college students with learning disabilities (LD) were as able as nondisabled students to use story grammar and comparison text structure to aid recall of social studies text passages. However, LD students scored significantly lower on use of causation text structure. Results suggest that use of comparison structures precede…

Learning-disabled junior-high students (N=27) were taught four chapters of U.S. history using either mnemonic instruction or more traditional, textbook based instruction. Students learned substantially more content when instructed mnemonically, on individual chapter tests as well as on the cumulative recall test. Students and teachers both…

The ability to monitor learning and memory of sentences was investigated in a group of 72 undergraduate students. Some sentences included within-sentence elaborations clarifying subject-verb-object relations and some did not. Results provide insights into subjects' recall and ability to monitor item difficulty and into effects of testing. (TJH)

Three experiments examined the effects of outlines prefacing text and headings inserted in the text on the recall of prose by 178 undergraduates. Results indicate that a combination of outlines and headings best benefit readers' recall. Results are discussed from a schema activation perspective. (SLD)