Thirty-six reading specialists and classroom teachers enrolled in a graduate reading diagnosis course participated in a study to determine whether clinical performance could be improved by alterations in a clinician's memory and strategy. Overall procedures in this study included pretests, 30 hours of clinical training in diagnosis, and posttests.…

Two naturalistic studies of young (18-30 month old) children's memory for object location are reported which indicate that young children's memories are better than non-naturalistic studies suggest and that they have confidence in their memories. In the first study, 17 children were observed attempting to find objects they had watched their…

Empirical research is reviewed in the area of cognitive psychology pertaining to models of human memory. Research evidence and theoretical considerations are combined to develop guidelines for future theory development related to the human memory. The following theoretical constructs and variables are discussed: (1) storage versus process…

The purpose of this study was threefold: to determine whether adding a mnemonic to systematically designed instruction would improve verbal retention, to establish whether retention is better for concrete or abstract information, and to determine whether mental imagery or verbal elaboration is more effective for learning concrete or abstract…

The four papers in this collection discuss language perception and comprehension and report on experiments in those areas. The first paper, "The Influence of Non-Linguistic Knowledge on Perceiving and Verifying Sentences," discusses the reliance of language perception and comprehension on the interaction of linguistic and world…

The effect of three levels of short-term memory (STM) and four learning modes (control, chunking organizational strategy, programmed instruction, and adjunct questions) on prose learning and recall was studied. The participants in this study were educational psychology students at Towson State College in Maryland. Significant STM and learning mode…

This study investigated the development of story recall in elementary school children through development of a model of story comprehension which specified both the rules for informational transformations and elaborations and the nature of the organizational structure of stories. Using Rumelhart's (1974) schema for analyzing stories in terms of a…

This study evaluates the effectiveness of a mnemonic procedure, called the keyword method, for teaching a large Russian language vocabulary to college students. The method divides the study of a vocabulary item into two stages. The first stage requires the student to associate the spoken Russian word to an English word (the keyword) that sounds…

The paired-associate learning of 52 fourth graders was related to measures of cognitive ability obtained the previous year. Subjects were administered the paired-associate task under one of three variations: at a comfortable rate with standard instructions; at a comfortable rate with a potentially effective learning strategy (visual imagery); and…

This paper reports on a study concerned with rapid mental operations of the central processor as it performs tasks such as the comparison of rotated figures, mental arithmetic, sentence verification, and memory scanning. The central processor is the site of most of the symbol manipulation that takes place in the human information processing…

Two passages were written, one on the topic of graphs and one on the topic of sonnets. Sixteen versions of each passage were constructed. Each version contained identical content but different textual manipulations. One hundred twelve community college students and 48 Cornell students participated in the experiment. Each read a single version of…

This study attempted to discover the relative contribution to spelling achievement (the dependent variable) of each of the following independent variables: intelligence, visual memory, auditory memory, structural analysis, phonetic analysis, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. Participating in the study were 190 students from six seventh-grade…

This study explored the developmental changes in children's effective utilization of verbal versus pictorial stimuli in forming connections between stimulus and response elements in a paired-associate task. A total of 112 children (56 males and 56 females), half of them 4-year-olds and half 8-year-olds, were tested under eight conditions involving…

This book is a collection of the papers presented at the fifth International Interdisciplinary Conference on Piagetian Theory and the Helping Professions, held at the University of Southern California on January 24, 1975. The conference was sponsored by University Affiliated Program at Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles; 44 papers are included.…

This paper reports an attempt to replicate previously published findings on the interrelationship between free-recall performance and selected cognitive abilities. In Experiment I, 300 7th and 12th graders responded to a battery of eight intelligence and memory tests and were then randomly assigned to one of three pre-learning instructional…