The purpose of this study was to determine an optimal schedule for the frequency and spacing of drill and practice in the learning of verbal information. Subjects for the first phase were 62 fourth, fifth, and sixth graders in a public elementary school. Using a computer-based drill involving the naming of the capitals of the 50 states of the…

This paper has two purposes: (1) to describe how qualitative studies, drawing on educational criticism, have thrown into relief some salient features of curriculum and instruction in social studies; and (2) to compare and contrast the current reform proposal to upgrade geography education. The qualitative studies that are reviewed are the…

The comprehension and recall of instructional text is heavily dependent upon the contexts in which information input and retrieval occur. College students (N=44) recalled the contents of a hierarchically structured text immediately after study and again six weeks later. Total meaningful recall was better when the superordinate concepts, or cues,…

Assessing the effect of memory improvement strategies upon long-term forgetting, two studies investigated the influence of popular mnemonic devices (the keyword method and the "method of loci") upon forgetting relative to rote rehearsal. The first study (79 subjects) compared the forgetting of French vocabulary words learned either by…

A relationship has been hypothesized between metamemory (the self-knowledge of memory processes that an individual can verbalize) and actual memory performance. To explore this relationship, a study was conducted, in partial replication of earlier studies, using the strategy choice paradigm for paired-associate learning (PAL) on a metamemory…

Twenty male and 20 female first graders were trained in a paired-associates (PA) learning task to test the hypothesis that instructions to generate interactive mental images of word referents and interactive imagery training administered prior to PA learning facilitate cued recall. Subjects were randomly assigned to one of the following five…

Many students, it is argued, view medical education as a onetime requirement for the mastery of facts. They give little thought to the application of these facts or the ethical contexts in which they are used, and they are not being educated for a lifetime of learning. (MLW)

Although research over the past 20 years has examined the dynamics of student learning, most initial studies focused on how scholastic aptitude tests and teacher rating scales predicted academic success. This study attempts to determine the relationship between scholastic aptitude and three approaches to learning: (1) presage; (2) process; and (3)…

Two content-independent learning strategies were evaluated to determine their effectiveness in facilitating learning on two types of information-processing tasks, spatial learning and concept learning. The network strategy used imagery with a peg-mnemonic and a hierarchical retrieval system, while the rote strategy elicited a stimulus-response…

Three learning modules are described and investigated as they reflect different students' conceptions of and approaches to learning. The Schoolwork Module (SWM) focuses on task performance and involves a passive, incremental, piecemeal, and rote memory method of learning, parallel to what might be implied by the Information Processing model of…

The effect of cognitive style and learning conditions on the rote verbal learning performance of Mexican American subjects classified as field independent or field dependent was investigated. Field dependent referred to a strong perceptual influence caused by the context or background while field independent referred to an ability to overcome the…

This document asserts that mathematics is becoming essential to many more disciplines. The paper is an attempt to describe the sorts of curricular changes which many mathematics educators are now recommending. The paper discusses: (1) mathematical power; (2) mathematics instruction; (3) new research directions; (4) mathematical thinking and…

The associations among cognitive automatization, abstract problem solving, and educational performance were studied using 127 fourth to ninth grade students. A number of measures of fast, automatic, and fluent performance (FAF measures) were used: writing the alphabet; reading from a word list; and mentally performing arithmetic operations. The…

An investigation was designed to reveal, describe, and assess the rote-level and meaningful-level understandings students attained as they progressed through the learning of new concepts. This study used an assessment technique used in previous research called "mental modeling" to ascertain the nature (meaningful, rote) of the…

This study investigated the retention of meaningful understanding of the biological topics of meiosis, the Punnett square method and the relations between these two topics. This study also explored the predictive influence of students' general tendency to learn meaningfully or by rote (meaningful learning orientation), prior knowledge of meiosis,…