Visual-verbal paired-associate learning (PAL) is thought to be related to reading acquisition and, more specifically, to word reading skills. To date, the uniqueness and strength of this relationship has remained unclear because most studies have been conducted in opaque orthographies such as English, and few studies have controlled for all of the…

Relational reasoning, or the ability to identify meaningful patterns within streams of information, has emerged as an important factor in a variety of complex tasks. One factor that has received relatively little research attention, however, is how relational reasoning may be influenced by the representational systems (i.e., verbal or nonverbal)…

Despite the importance of good lecture notes to test performance, very little is known about the cognitive processes that underlie effective lecture note taking. The primary purpose of the 2 studies reported (a pilot study and Study 1) was to investigate 3 processes hypothesized to be significantly related to quality of notes: transcription…

The presence of questions improved retention for material directly related to the questions but not for incidental information, and their presence had no effect on the amount of retroactive inhibition. (Author)

Provides evidence of the existence of serial position and isolation effects in a classroom lecture simulation involving extended meaningful discourse. Isolating an item facilitated learning of that item. (Author/DEP)

Examines the hypothesis that some people are verbal learners and some people are visual learners. Presented a battery of 14 cognitive measures related to the visualizer-verbalizer dimension to 95 college students and then conducted correlational and factor analyses. Results have implications for how to conceptualize and measure individual…

Investigates a subject's internalized goals and the relationship of the goals to test performance as a function of different learning instructions. Stating specific goals was found to produce the most significant results among subjects. (Author/DEP)

Concludes that information retention varies with subjects' reactions to feedback and the kind of immediate practice. (RB)

Experiments showed that in verbal discrimination learning imaging the referent of the correct item was more facilitative than vocalizing the correct item, as long as the imagery structure was executed in the company of relevant motor activity. No difference between the two strategies was found in pictorial discrimination learning. (Author/BJG)

Tests, with five groups, the production of facilitative transfer effects with the use of five abstract passages. It was predicted, based on assumptions about knowledge structures that three of the groups would recall more from the second passage than would the latter two groups. The results confirmed this prediction. (Author/DEP)

Results indicated that negative instances were an integral part of concept acquisiton. The relationship between the positive and negative instances was based upon similarity of irrelevant attributes and sentence difficulty. (Author)

To understand the development of number-word construction, students in grades 1, 3, 5, and 7 named and counted from a set of numbers into the billions in two studies. Findings are discussed both in relation to children's growing knowledge of the number system and to vocabulary development. (Author)

The results of the study show that illustrations combined with aural stimuli facilitate the learning of prose among six year old students when the choice of objects used in the illustration is not left to the child. (Author/DEP)

Reports the results of two experiments on the effect of delay of informative feedback, immediate tests, and forms of informative feedback upon seven-day retention. (RB)