Two studies were performed to investigate the effects of material and task variations in the acquisition of cognitive learning strategies. Groups of undergraduate students were taught to use mental imagery, meaningful elaboration, and grouping. The type of training task or the order of training and test materials differed for each of the…

The performance of good and poor readers was compared on a series of three visually presented paired associate tasks varying the verbal codability level of response items. Performance of the 32 poor readers was significantly lower than that of the 32 good readers across all three tasks. There were no differences between good and poor readers in…

REINFORCEMENT CONCEPTS DERIVED LARGELY FROM RESEARCH OF SUBHUMAN SUBJECTS WERE TESTED FOR APPLICABILITY TO HUMAN-LEARNING SITUATIONS SIMILAR TO THOSE THAT OCCUR IN SCHOOLS. A SERIES OF EXPLORATORY STUDIES CONDUCTED IS DESCRIBED IN PART II OF THIS REPORT. IN PART III, TWO EXPERIMENTS CONDUCTED TO DETERMINE THE REINFORCING VALUE OF DIFFERENT STIMULI…

TWO FEASIBILITY STUDIES WERE CONDUCTED TO OBTAIN EVIDENCE OF THE VALUE OF INSTRUCTING CHILDREN WITH THE TALKING BOOK SYSTEM. SUBJECTS WERE TWO GROUPS OF CHILDREN RANGING IN AGE FROM 5-0 TO 6-1 YEARS. THE CHILDREN MANIPULATED THE EQUIPMENT AND DIRECTED THE MAGNETIC READER IN ORDER TO LEARN TO READ SIX SIGHT WORDS AND THE TWO-WORD SENTENCES…

People sometimes forget a name or a word, and are plagued by the feeling that the sought-for word is somewhere in memory but not immediately available. The frequent description of this tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon as subthreshold memory traces is challenged by data showing that TOT genesis and TOT recovery are distinct processes. In a verbal…

This study investigated storage and retrieval strategies as evidenced by systematic errors of first grade beginning readers on a noun-noun paired-associate learning task. The subjects were 80 black children and 80 white children, in three racially integrated Cincinnati public schools, attending the first grade for the first time. These 160…

In a replication of a similar study with American children, 56 normal native Israeli children (5-years-old) were studied to determine the universality of self-generated verbal mediators as a means of enhancing memory processes. Eight Ss, randomly selected, were assigned in each of the following conditions: labeling, sentence generation, listening…

Heart rate change was used as the index of the orienting response (OR) of 102 kindergarten children. Heart rate change was measured by recording heart rate upon the presentation of tones. 15 similar tones followed by a different, 16th tone, were used. From this data the children were divided into high, medium, or low orientors. Following the…

In order to investigate the effect of reinforcement on learning, 21 disadvantaged black children, 4 to 5 years of age, were divided among three treatment groups. Group I children received only feedback (information) as to the correctness or incorrectness of their responses. Group II children received a raisin for each correct response, and group…

Heart rate change was used as the index of the orienting response (OR) of 102 kindergarten children. Heart rate change was measured by recording heart rate upon the presentation of tones. 15 similar tones followed by a different, 16th tone, were used. From this data the children were divided into high, medium, or low orientors. Following the…

Results are reported of five studies of word meanings and associations of the deaf child. Subjects from two oral schools for the deaf and a group of normally hearing students were given a word association test. The generally higher same form class responses of subjects from oral school B were thought to reflect their language instruction which…

These four studies in a series deal with good and poor readers' utilization of selected cues in paired-associate learning. Specific cues considered were color, order of presentation, and verbal mediators. Answers to two basic questions were sought: (1) Do the selected cues have a facilitative effect upon children's paired-associate learning? (2)…

This experiment tested conjectures concerning the effects of learners' attending preferences on the establishment of auditory-visual intersensory associations in a bisensory paired associate task. Attending patterns were identified through the use of a bisensory diget-span task. On the basis of fifth and sixth grade subjects' performance during…

This study investigated whether or not Sights and Sounds, a filmstrip-record series originally designed for speech-hearing handicapped children, could produce perceptual discrimination learning of familiar sounds in primary level educable mentally retarded (EMR) children and whether EMR children were susceptible to perceptual learning via…

Constant-order paired-associate lists were used in which the numbers 1-24 were stimulus terms, and 24 nouns were response terms. The order of the nouns was varied across five lists to produce a different number of the hierarchical conceptual levels in the lists. There were two degrees of original learning and three types of retention tests after…