The short-term memory of 24 retarded and 24 nonretarded individuals, aged 10 to 14, under conditions of restricted cognitive strategy use was investigated. An attempt was made to determine whether short-term memory difficulties of persons with mental retardation are caused by deficits in voluntary cognitive strategies, such as the organization and…

Aimed at classroom teachers interested in teaching learning skills to their elementary and secondary students, this guide offers an alternative to teaching "facts" that may rapidly become outdated. The guide is based on Dr. Leslie Hart's Proster Theory, which proposes that the brain requires large amounts of input to function; that after…

Twenty college students read passages from John Steinbeck's "Log from the Sea of Cortez," so that the effect of their study strategies on their recall of idea units in the passages could be tested, both immediately after reading and after a one-week delay. The experiment provided a comparison of the effectiveness of two imposed study patterns, a…

This paper gives a method to determine a person's hypothetical conceptualization of an object -- its breakdown into subassemblies, subsubassemblies, and so on -- from the person's sequence of requests for pieces used in constructing it. A technique is given to determine whether, given a group of conceptualizations, there is a typical one. The…

In this study 27 third graders and 27 sixth graders were given varying degrees of practice in sorting salient, categorized word lists. The purpose of the practice conditions was to encourage different levels of grouping strategies in a subsequent free recall task using similar categorized materials. Children in a Materials Only condition were…

Research on working memory has revealed a developmental trend in memory performance, but a controversy exists as to whether the improved performance is due to a developmental increase in working memory total processing space (M-space), is the result of more efficient processing and storage of material, or is due to the use of "chunking" or other…

A discussion of the ease or difficulty of learning vocabulary words in a second language looks at a variety of issues in second language instruction. Research on factors in vocabulary learning is discussed, focusing on such factors as similarity in form and morphology, deceptive morphological structure, different syntactic patterning in the native…

A study investigated reconstructive recall for linguistic style. It was hypothesized that (1) features of linguistic style would be more difficult to recall than underlying content, (2) reconstructive errors would include stylistic forms recalled as standard forms when subjects lacked productive control of a particular feature of a style, and (3)…

To provide a theoretical base for investigating the influence of inferential error on group decision making, current literature on both inferential error and decision making is reviewed and applied to the Watergate incident. Although groups tend to make fewer inferential errors because members' inferences are generally not biased in the same…

Individual differences in fourth grade students' abilities to profit from experimenter-provided picture adjunct aids on prose recall tasks were examined. It was hypothesized that poor paired associate learners would benefit from picture adjunct aids to a greater extent than good paired associate learners. A secondary aim was to assess the effects…

Four elements of clinical programming must be considered during development in order for a software program to be truly useful in rehabilitation: presentation of a useful task; treatment parameters selectable by clinicians; data collection/analysis; and authoring capability. These criteria govern the development of all Brain-Link Software…

In 1981, James Coleman reported results of a study indicating that private schools were superior to public schools. He claimed that supporting private schools through tax credits or vouchers was in the interest of society. To explore the possibility that differences attributed to schools might be due to differences in student skills, motivation,…

This review of literature on the topic of learning style opens with a history of the development of theories on information processing habits which represent the learner's typical modes of perceiving, thinking, remembering, and problem solving. A discussion is included on writings about the sense modalities used in learning--visual, aural,…

A study investigated the role of visual imagery in the comprehension and retention of prose. Subjects were 48 fifth grade students who orally read a story and then completed three comprehension tasks directly related to the story: a retelling, an oral reading cloze test, and a multiple choice question test comprised of items demonstrated to be…

Little is known about how teachers encourage memory activity and strategy use in children. In order to gain such information, 69 teachers of grades K through 6 were observed in five 30-minute periods. A total of 292 strategy suggestions and 15 instances in which the teacher attempted to suppress spontaneous strategy use were observed. Teachers…