THE REINFORCING EFFECTS OF DIFFERENT ENVIRONMENTAL CONTINGENCIES, IN WHICH A VERBAL LEARNING TASK WAS PRESENTED, WERE TESTED. THE LEARNING TASK INVOLVED A SIMULATION OF THE PROCESS BY WHICH THE PUPIL APPROACHES BEGINNING READING THROUGH THE ACQUISITION OF A BASIC SIGHT VOCABULARY. THE CRITERION FOR MEASURING DIFFERENTIAL EFFECT WAS ESTABLISHED AS…

This study had as its purpose the investigation of visual-verbal presentation modes when used for instruction in different types of learning tasks with learners of differing mental abilities. Five parallel experiments were conducted, each for a different learning objective or task (identification, comparison, classification, generalization,…

Research into the effectiveness of various approaches to reading instruction, while it has dealt with several which are promising, has been unsuccessful in establishing any one as superior. Therefore, one especially important aspect of future research should be an examination of meaningfulness and its effect on children's verbal learning. This…

Examined the maintenance of cumulative-cluster and cluster rehearsal strategies on free recall tasks as a function of amount of strategy training. Subjects were 50 elementary school students in third and fourth grades. (Author/MP)

Confirms the hypothesis that meaningful verbal instruction will be most efficient when it proceeds from the general to the specific, from the superordinate to the subordinate. (RB)

This experiment (involving kindergarteners and fourth graders) examined the development of the ability to encode, store, and retrieve verbally-or visually-presented material when the modality of the test stimulus was varied. (JMB)

Presents a study of age differences in memory organization during repeated recall tasks. Second and sixth grade children served as subjects. (BD)

This experiment examined the possibility that deficient rehearsal is responsible for poor learning in children with learning disabilities by comparing single-trial immediate and delayed free recall of learning disabled children and children with no such disability. (Author/SB)

Aspects of the processing of frequency information were investigated in two studies. The first showed that second graders were as prepared to process frequency differences as adults. The second showed that practice at frequency counting does not improve the performance of young adults and neither does feedback regarding earlier performance.…

In a combined verbal and motor paired-associate task, children in kindergarten, second grade, and fourth grade learned nonsense names and spatial responses for three random shapes. Results showed evidence for mediation at all three age levels and increased mediational effects with age. (Author/JMB)

Syntactical mediation refers to the phenomenson in which the grammatical structure of language can be employed in the structure of verbal mediators. (Authors/MB)

Examines whether teaching poor text comprehenders reading strategies will improve reading comprehension. Third through fifth grade adequate decoders who were poor comprehenders were trained for 10 weeks in either a verbally or visually based reciprocal teaching program. Results reveal that training reading comprehension strategies in small groups…

This paper summarizes data comparing the correlation patterns of psychometric, social, and demographic variables with intelligence quotient (IQ) and learning potential (LP) scores derived from the Kohs Block Designs and Raven Progressive Matrices procedures. The sample consists of educable mentally retarded special class and institutionalized…