OpenCourseWare (OCW) has received increasing attention over the past few years in higher education. These courses provide appealing opportunities to view classes taught in well-established universities worldwide. The current study aims to examine how OCW lectures can serve as authentic learning materials to facilitate vocabulary acquisition for…

Problem solving, reasoning, and analytical thinking are defined and described as teachable repertoires. This paper describes work performed at a school serving special needs children, Morningside Academy, that has resulted in specific procedures developed over the past 15 years. These procedures include modifying "Think Aloud Pair Problem…

The present study examined whether the presentation of stimuli in equivalence relations with consequences increases the operant behavior that produces these consequences. In Experiment 1, both normal words and experimentally trained equivalence stimuli did so with young children. In Experiment 2, results were similar with college students. Here, a…

This study investigated the research construct of encoding specificity using an applied research orientation. Encoding specificity considers the effects on memory of the interactive relationship among encoding, the stored memory trace, and external retrieval cues. Subjects were 273 undergraduate students enrolled in the College of Engineering at…

Six experiments investigated loss of availability of surface form in sentence comprehension. Explanations for the loss included: (1) linguistic hypothesis; (2) memory limitations hypothesis; (3) integration hypothesis; and (4) processing shift hypothesis. (LMO)

Previous studies of the effect of age and modality on digit span task performance have yielded inconsistent results. To eliminate some of the methodological difficulties in prior research, 18 college students and 18 older adults were given the digit span task by means of three different modalities: (1) visual successive; (2) visual simultaneous;…

Both technical health words and common health words produce communication blockages in college sex education classes. (MM)

Two studies were conducted to train students to use imagery in their learning and to investigate whether such training would transfer to solving visual puzzles and verbal problems. In the first study, with 78 graduate students, 29 experimental-group subjects were given a lecture and slide presentation designed to teach about imagery. Both the…

Thirty college undergraduates participated in a study of the effects of acoustic and visual interference on the recall of word and picture triads in both short-term and long-term memory. The subjects were presented 24 triads of monosyllabic nouns representing all of the possible combinations of presentation types: pictures, printed words, and…

This study compared word association responses for college students in three geographic areas from four different kinds of colleges: (1) selective predominantly white colleges, (2) less selective predominantly white colleges, (3) selective predominantly black colleges, and (4) less selective predominantly black colleges. Stimulus words were chosen…

Six experiments involving 192 infants and 1 experiment with 16 college students examined sensitivity to acoustic correlates of phrasal units in English. A basic finding is that nine-month-old infants are sensitive to acoustic markers that correspond to major phrasal units, a sensitivity that develops after six months. (SLD)

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…

The purpose of this study was to explore how adult users interact and learn during a computer-based simulation given visual and verbal forms of feedback coupled with embedded elaborations of the content. A total of 52 college students interacted with a computer-based simulation of Newton's laws of motion in which they had control over the motion…

Hemispheric processing of visually presented words and pictures was examined in third and seventh graders and college students. Pictorial or symbolic stimuli were presented singly to either the right or left visual hemifield and subjects had to decide whether the first stimulus in a pair matched the second stimulus. (JMB)

Results of four experiments show that developmental differences in elaborative conceptual processing at acquisition and retrieval contribute independently to developmental increases in recall. Item identification processes for both words and pictures constrain children's elaborative processing. The constraints are time limited. (RH)