Research concerning the applied educational potential of Richard Atkinson's mnemonic "keyword method" is reported in this paper. Included are possibilities for stretching the limits of the keyword method by combining it with other mnemonic and prose-learning strategies. The first half of the paper provides an overview of mnemonics--the…

In this study of second and fifth graders, story relevant pictures and subject generated images were presented to determine the kind of story information likely to be enhanced by real and imagined pictures. Results indicate that central and peripheral information was facilitated by visual illustrations, primarily the former. (JEG)

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…

The two experiments described investigated the effects of pictures on the recall of prose passages from newspapers by children. Both single pictures expressing the main idea and groups of pictures illustrating each sentence helped fourth graders recall content. (Author/BK)

Recent evidence suggests that whereas pictures are more easily recognized, discriminated, associated, and recalled than their corresponding verbal labels, this is not the case in concept acquisition/utilization tasks. If such evidence is interpreted in terms of a "frequency theory" perspective, one would expect the typically obtained…

Second- and fourth-grade children learned two 25-item, paired-associate mixed lists under three experimental conditions: instructed imagery, imposed imagery, and control. Four specific transfer paradigms and a reference paradigm were represented in the lists. The specific transfer paradigms were constructed such that a first list stimulus term (a…

Consistent learning gains are associated with the use of pictures when experiments adhere to five ground rules: (1) prose passages are presented orally; (2) the subjects are children; (3) the passages are fictional narratives; (4) the pictures overlap the story content; and (5) learning is demonstrated by factual recall. (Author)

Two experiments, involving 90 first-grade children, were conducted to test a retrieval-inefficiency explanation for the failure of visual imagery to facilitate young children's prose recall. (Author/MP)

Four experiments with 132 seventh graders, 162 eighth graders, 75 fourth graders, and 52 third graders compared the mnemonic keyword method with various other vocabulary learning strategies. Mnemonic keyword students outperformed sentence-context and free-study counterparts and generally outperformed others on tests of vocabulary usage. (SLD)

Prose-learning strategies are classified in this paper as prose-dependent (those that authors can use to optimize communication) or processor-dependent (those that learners can use to optimize reception) and are cross-classified as stage-setting (those that prepare the learner for upcoming prose information) or storage-retrieval oriented (those…