OpenCourseWare (OCW) has received increasing attention over the past few years in higher education. These courses provide appealing opportunities to view classes taught in well-established universities worldwide. The current study aims to examine how OCW lectures can serve as authentic learning materials to facilitate vocabulary acquisition for…

Problem solving, reasoning, and analytical thinking are defined and described as teachable repertoires. This paper describes work performed at a school serving special needs children, Morningside Academy, that has resulted in specific procedures developed over the past 15 years. These procedures include modifying "Think Aloud Pair Problem…

The present study examined whether the presentation of stimuli in equivalence relations with consequences increases the operant behavior that produces these consequences. In Experiment 1, both normal words and experimentally trained equivalence stimuli did so with young children. In Experiment 2, results were similar with college students. Here, a…

In this article, we explore an interactive learning process in a digital forum that focused on personal cases drawn from student teachers' classroom experience. To this end, we combined theoretical and methodological frameworks of knowledge-based and discourse-analytic perspectives that enabled us to uncover evidence showing what the students may…

A series of experiments investigating the processing of artificial set inclusion relations supports the view that many college students have the appropriate schema for processing inclusion relations, although it has not been elicited in previous artificial set-inclusion studies. (Author/PN)

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the relative efficiency of verbal and visual adjunct aids for concrete and abstract prose learning. For the abstract passage, verbal aids worked best and visual aids were somewhat disruptive. The concrete passage did not demonstrate the equivalency for two types of aids. (Author/PN)

Two studies investigated how components of speaking rate, articulation rate and pause rate, combine to influence processing of the silence-duration cue for the voicing distinction in medial stop consonants. Listeners adjust for both articulation rate and pause rate changes in articulation rate had more effect on phonetic judgments. (Author/RD)

Judging plausibility is argued to be a more efficient strategy than direct retrieval (finding a propositional match) to judge a statement's truth. A proposed model contrasts the strategies in terms of verbatim memory and duration. Direct retrieval is faster when verbatim traces are strong, but plausibility judgment is more efficient over time.…

Different tasks were compared using the same subjects, stimuli, and experimental methodology. The results indicate that the lexical-decision task does tend to produce greater inhibition effects than the naming task. (Author/PN)

Six experiments investigated loss of availability of surface form in sentence comprehension. Explanations for the loss included: (1) linguistic hypothesis; (2) memory limitations hypothesis; (3) integration hypothesis; and (4) processing shift hypothesis. (LMO)

Four experiments studied effects of difficulty of word identification on optional conceptual processing by second, third, and fifth graders, and college students in a cued recall task. Results indicated that contrastive processing facilitates recall, and that difficulty of word identification may limit the extent of optional contrastive…

Fourteen groups of college students were shown a 30-minute film, introducing an assembly kit, in one of seven versions of visual-narrative overlap. For best associative recall of object names, results indicated visuals should be presented before or simultaneously with text in dual-media presentations. (Author/BS)

The slower progress of semantic memory research is attributed to the difficulties involved in testing the relevant theories. This paper proposes a model for testing such theories using the Continuous Response (CR) task. The model establishes a link between the rate of recall and the semantic relationships among the category items. (JAZ)

Verbal contextual information affected photography and nonphotography students' performance on semantic retention tests. For example, correct titles aided the formation and retention of accurate memories, while erroneous titles misled students into remembering meanings that had relatively little to do with what was actually pictured in the…

Reaction time to detect a phoneme target in a sentence was faster when the target-containing word formed part of the semantic focus of the sentence. Sentence understanding was facilitated by rapid identification of focused information. Active search for accented words can be interpreted as a search for semantic focus. (Author/RD)