The purpose of this experiment was to determine whether a constant information processing rate would occur when subjects in verbal discrimination (VD) learning were presented a mixture of items of different lengths. Forty-two Naval Postgraduate School students served in a VD experiment with a random mixture of two-, three-, and four-word items at…

Subjects in an independent groups free learning experiment recalled list of low- or high-arousal words, matched for imagery and frequency and exposed randomly for 3 seconds and 9 seconds. Extrapolating neural consolidation theory to previous work on serial position effects led to the predictions that (1) arousal facilitates primacy; (2) arousal…

In this third Occasional Paper in the Science series of The Science and Mathematics Education Information Analysis Center, Ausubel explains the nature and theoretical rationale of "organizers", abstract, general, and inclusive statements presented prior to new learning tasks to provide specific relevant anchoring ideas in the learner's…

THE EFFECTS OF INTERPOLATED ITEMS ON THE LEARNING AND RETENTION OF INDIVIDUAL STIMULUS-RESPONSE (S-R) UNITS IN PAIRED-ASSOCIATE LEARNING WERE INVESTIGATED. EXPERIMENTS WERE DESIGNED TO DETERMINE THE EFFECTS OF INTERFERENCE PRODUCED BY OTHER ITEMS WHICH OCCUR NATURALLY WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF A STANDARD PAIRED-ASSOCIATE TASK. IN ADDITION, SEVERAL…

Study to determine whether learning is a phenomenon of input processing, output processing, or both. (Author/DS)

Effects on learning of most principal independent variables can be generalized within, but not between, five different categories: intellectual skills, verbal information, cognitive strategies, motor skills, and attitudes. Psychological research has been and continues to be well-served by this categorization. (GC)

This research project investigated some of the characteristics of primary and secondary memory. In the primary research, subjects were given a list of words followed by an interpolated task. The data of interest were the recall for terminal items in the list. Using this procedure, the researchers have demonstrated negative recency in initial…

This paper, presented at the 1973 meeting of the American Education Research Association, discusses some of the studies conducted in the area of learning from prose. The first study dealt with pooling independent sentences into groups of related sentences and preparing passages by stringing these sentences together. College students then read one…

Presents a progress report on some methodological advances made on certain facets of the problem of the learning of a structure of a subject matter. (PEB)

To investigate organizational strategies of educable mentally retarded (EMR) and normal boys, the performance of 30 normal boys (mean IQ 105.1) and 30 EMR boys (mean IQ 69.9), ages 7-12 years, was compared on various free recall learning tasks. Three measures of input organization employed were category clustering, associative clustering, and…

Children in kindergarten, third grade, and fifth grade were presented a list of either pictures or words (with items presented varying numbers of times on the study trail). In both picture and word conditions, half of the subjects estimated how many times each item had been presented (absolute judgments) and the other half judged which of two…

Eight experiments are described in this report. In experiment 1, four and five year olds were presented four verbal discrimination (VD) lists. For three of the lists all correct items were either conceptually, acoustically, or affectively similar. The fourth was a control list. The conceptual list facilitated VD learning. Experiment 2 indicated…

Discusses and refutes Novak's arguments against Piaget's theory of intellectual development in favor of Ausubel's theory of meaningful verbal learning. (GA)

Background: The relationship between the age of reaching infant developmental milestones and later intellectual function within the normal population remains unresolved. We hypothesised that the age of learning to stand in infancy would be associated with adult executive function and that the association would be apparent throughout the range of…