This report presents a pilot study which collected preadolescents' retrospective reports of their preschool experiences with the television program, "Sesame Street." One-hundred-five fifth and sixth graders ranging from 9 to 12 years of age were asked to think back to when they viewed "Sesame Street" in their younger years and…

A study examined whether (1) the performance of students on text explicit (TE), text implicit (TI), and script implicit (SI) questions inserted in a text would vary as a function of the type of question received; (2) students responding in writing to the inserted questions would perform at a higher level on a subsequent criterion test than those…

Intended as a chapter in "Carmichael's Manual of Child Psychology," this paper provides an overview and interpretation of the work already completed on children's learning, remembering, and understanding with a major concentration on academic cognition. The first part of the paper provides a brief overview of the principal trends of the 1970s and…

The first phase of this study focused on the effects of message redundancy on communication accuracy of listeners in kindergarten, second, and fifth grades under memory and stimulus-visible conditions. Three nearly identical line drawings, each containing a large number of items in common and at least one distinctive feature, were presented on…

In this study four research strategies used in previous studies of the socialization of cognitive skills were first contrasted and then assessed in terms of five criteria. (The data base for this study was 32 videotapes of mothers preparing their 7- or 9-year-old children to take a memory test.) The four strategies (frequency coding, fine-grained…

Much recent cognitive and artificial intelligence research has focused on the development of "schema theory." This theory supposes the existence of knowledge and memory structures that encode prototypical descriptions of familiar concepts. Schema theory has developed in a scientific environment that stresses interdisciplinary approaches…

Age-related characteristics of children's short-term retention of kinesthetic movement information were examined in this study. Three age levels (6-, 8-, and 10-year old children) were tested for recall of preselected location movements on a linear slide apparatus. Immediate and delayed recall were used in 16 trials. The results indicate that…

A study was conducted to evaluate children's ability to comprehend main ideas after reading connected discourse and to develop and validate a straightforward and intuitively simple system for identifying main ideas in prose. Three experimental passages were randomly selected from third and sixth grade social studies textbooks, and education…

This review of the literature on reading theories is built around three components: an explication of each theory, an evaluation of the theory based on an examination of its internal and external coherence and correspondence, and an application of the theory to a child's reading. The literature is organized around discussions of 12 benchmarks…

A study investigated the hypothesis that mental imagery facilitates access to prior knowledge and therefore enhances the ability to infer and make text-relevant predictions. The subjects, 29 first grade and 29 third grade students, were randomly assigned to either an experimental group where they were instructed to make pictures in their head to…

Approaches to helping students remember concepts in secondary mathematics are presented. The eleven points listed are: 1) distinguishing between natural and whole numbers; 2) remembering isosceles triangles have two equal sides; 3) finding all possible pairs of integral factors of a given number; 4) recalling the meaning of reflexive, symmetric,…

This paper argues that the information processing model provides a promising basis on which to build a comprehensive theory of instruction. Characteristics of the major information processing constructs are outlined including attention, encoding and rehearsal, working memory, long term memory, retrieval, and metacognitive processes, and a unifying…

In this report, three theories of transitive inference are compared as they apply to the solution of linear syllogisms: a spatial theory, a linguistic theory, and a new mixed linguistic-spatial theory. Each theory is expressed in terms of an information-processing (flow chart) model and a mathematical model that quantifies the…

This study examined the effect(s) of rhyme on the recognition and recall of story events by 32 nursery school children at the University of Maine Child Study Center. Although subjects reported liking stories better when they were presented as nursery rhymes rather than prose passages, recognition of story events was significantly higher for prose…

In this pilot study, the effect of experimenter cuing on recall and organization of response was analyzed and compared between subjects identified as learning disabled with an isolated memory impairment (LDMI), learning disabled without an isolated memory impairment (LDO), and normal controls (N). Six subjects were selected for each group after…