Examines story retention after one-week interval as a function of topic familiarity and test-item relatedness. Second- and fifth-grade children participated. (MP)

Children from kindergarten, second, and fifth grade were verbally presented a passage containing an equal number of idea units which were relevant versus irrelevant to the main theme of a story. For all grade levels, relevant idea units were recalled to a greater extent than idea units irrelevant to the main theme. (CS)

In a study of second graders, results supported the hypothesis that recognition memory would be disrupted when children's attention control strategy required the same cognitive operations as the task material to be studied. (Author/MP)

Two studies were conducted with 8- and 10-year-old children to examine sources of age and skill differences in verbal analogical reasoning. Discussion focuses on the child's "problem space" for the analogy task and possible differences in task understanding that lead to strategy and process differences in older versus younger and skilled versus…

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…