A total of 121 third and fourth graders were randomly assigned to instructional treatments which each featured a short children's story. The treatments were oral-only, picture-only, and a combination of oral and pictures. Students saw and/or heard the presentation and were tested immediately and after a two-week retention interval for recall of…

To determine whether aural enhancements, or actualities, increase either audience recall of, or interest in, radio newscasts, two versions of the same newscast were presented to different groups of university students. One group heard the control report while the other listened to an experimental report supplemented with actualities. A…

The effects of encoding specificity were evaluated for learners: (1) in a typical classroom group learning environment, (2) receiving an audiovisual presentation on an academic subject, and (3) in a group testing environment. Encoding specificity involves the interaction between the encoding phase of memory or the learning context, the stored…

When handled well, description can give poetry and prose a quality of immediacy and accessibility by creating a dramatic context in which the writer's ideas and feelings can be shared by the reader. The use of perception stimulation can aid the student in producing effective images that lead to this dramatic context. To begin this learning…

Theories of cognitive processing suggest specific effects result from different elaboration treatments. To test this assumption, 125 high school students were randomly assigned to read concept materials containing adjunct elaborations that varied by elaboration type (mnemonics, schematics, or metaphors) and presentation mode (verbal or visual). To…

Four problems in children's paired-associate memory were addressed: (1) reappraisal of the presumed developmental trend in presentation mode effect during grade-school years, (2) identification of the locus of this developmental effect, (3) evaluation of the influence of combined presentation (verbal plus pictorial) relative to pictorial…

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…

A total of 90 fifth- and sixth-grade students studied a map of the fictitious island while twice listening to a 1,100-word prose passage describing it. The description included 16 nouns that had been chosen as map features. Map features were identified by labels and icons. Afterwards, students were given a cued recall test with 16 feature-related…

This study was conducted to investigate the effects of the animation of visual information when used in conjunction with text and static visuals in microcomputer-based instruction. Of particular interest were consequent performance on higher level learning tasks as a result of viewing these forms of visual presentation, and those levels of…

An interview protocol was devised to determine whether demands on working memory are reduced by the use of drawn or telegraphic formats. Students were chosen because some aspect of their group testing on presentation formats was provocative (e.g. high spatial score, but low reading comprehension score; high drawn score and low verbal score, etc.).…

In order to provide an estimate of encoding within the active mode and a comparison between three modes of representation (enactive, imagery, and verbal), 36 second grade children from the high socioeconomic community of Beverly Hills, California, were presented with object pairs under one of three conditions (haptic-object versus visual-object…

Ten concrete nouns represented in either a pictorial or a linguistic mode and accompanied by ten nonsense syllables were shown to 77 college students in a study of how pictorial stimuli varied in recall and recognition tasks. The group receiving pictorial stimuli recalled and recognized significantly more nonsense syllables than did the group…

A study was made to determine whether instructional cues presented to the learner as variations of audiovisual and textual information including a cue summation condition (combined textual, pictorial, and auditory cues) can facilitate the achievement of precise instructional objectives. Some 112 education students enrolled in a course on mental…

Describes the ViewFinder interface, designed at Indiana University as a client to a database server; it supports querying based on both visual and verbal clues. Presents results of usability analysis performed on ViewFinder with 18 users. High search success rates were achieved through both types of querying means; verbal clues were used more than…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect that coding (black and white or color) has on the achievement of students categorized as field dependent (FD) and field independent (FI) learners and to determine if there was any interaction between these variables (field dependency and color) across both visually and verbally oriented tests…