The role of paraphrased adjunct questions in facilitating learning from prose

Twenty-six college student read a 5000-word prose passage and answered either verbatim or paraphrased inserted questions while reading about international communication. Students either were or were not permitted to review the text while answering the inserted questions. On a subsequent post-test containing new paraphrases of the adjunct questions, students who received paraphrased adjunct questions outperformed students who received verbatim adjunct questions. This result supported the contention that paraphrased adjunct questions could facilitate meaningful learning from prose.     

Children's response characteristics in a structured self-paced learning task

Fourth and fifth-grade children identified as fast/inaccurate and slow/accurate responders on the basis of the Matching Familiar Figures test were administered a self-paced learning task. The task consisted of a 25 word categorizable list composed of five instances from each of five categories. Four treatment conditions, the usual random presentation and blocked presentation conditions plus random presentation with instructions and blocked presentation with instructions, were employed. Analysis of variance was used to analyze clustering, free recall, and cued recall performance. A significant main effect for type of treatment was found in clustering performance. A significant instruction by response style interaction in the analysis of free call performance indicated that while fast/inaccurate responders benefit from instructions, slow/accurate responders did not. When children identified as fast/inaccurate or slow/accurate were placed in self-paced learning situation, no significant difference was found in total viewing time of the stimulus materials.     

Effects of delayed retention on multiple-choice test performance

In two experiments, immediate feedback defined as feedback following the completion of a 40-item multiple-choice test and delayed feedback (received 48 hr later) were examined in a simulated classroom situation with college students. As defined, delayed feedback was not superior to immediate feedback, as would be predicted by the delayed retention effect. Also, feedback in the form of correct answer only was superior to correct answer plus distractors lending partial support to the frequency theory of recognition memory. In addition to not finding the delayed retention effect, an analysis of errors in experiment two did not support the interference—perseveration hypothesis as an explanation for the type of error committed following immediate feedback.     

Big school,small school: Impact of the high school environment

An investigation of the relationship between high school priorities and self-concept was undertaken. Upper and underclassmen from large and small high schools completed questionnaires and the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale. Participation in five activity areas was related to self-concept using a multiple-regression technique. The perceived similarity of each student's priorities with the school's priorities was also correlated with self-concept. The relationships accounting for the greatest proportion of the variance in self-concept scores were found among small-school upperclassmen. The results were interpreted as support for Barker's argument that small school students feel a greater obligation to participate in school activities.     

The episodic/semantic memory distinction as an heuristic in the study of instructional effects on cognitive structure

Previous attempts to measure the effects of instruction on students' cognitive structure have produced inconsistent and ambiguous findings. One reason may be that researchers have not distinguished between well-learned, abstracted information and memorized facts or formulas. Using the distinction between episodic and semantic memory as an heuristic, a procedure was designed to increase the likelihood that student performance on structure tasks was indicative of semantic rather than episodic memory. Significant correlations between measures of cognitive structure and performance on achievement test items were observed. In addition, partial correlations revealed that the measures of cognitive structure are correlated with the achievement items tapping higher-order cognitive processes and not with items tapping lower-order processes. These results are interpreted as supporting the argument that related research needs to be guided by theory-based definitions of cognitive structure.     

A historical overview of educational psychology

A historical review of educational psychology might improve understanding of current status and problems. Before American development of the field, the Greeks, Juan Vives in the 16th century, and Pestalozzi and Herbart in the 19th century applied psychological views to educational problems. Despite the absence of scientific psychology in 19th century America, normal schools offered courses purporting to be psychological in content; these courses were supported by textbooks on the subject. James began, and Thorndike developed, the discipline that by the mid-1920s had assumed much of its current form. Journals and academic departments appeared in the first quarter of the century also. The continuing search through the middle of the century for a satisfying professional organization reflected educational psychology's difficulties in establishing an identity. It is not clear even today that the field has “crystallized,” as one writer described it in the 1920s.     

Contributions of existing knowledge structure to retroactive inhibition in prose learning

This experiment tested the hypothesis that prose materials related to existing knowledge structure will be less subject to retroactive interference (RI) than will materials not as easily related to existing knowledge structure. Subjects read successive passages labeled with the names of famous or fictitious characters. In comparison to control groups, subjects receiving initial passages labeled with fictitious names experienced significant RI, whereas subjects receiving famous name initial passages did not.     

Effects of knowledge of semantic roles on summarizing written prose

College students wrote summaries of eight short passages as a test of their ability to identify important information. After pairing naive summaries according to length and original passage, those summaries which judges identified as “better” were found to contain significantly more of the major semantic roles, such as Agent and Instrument, than did summaries judged “not as good.” It was also found that students wrote significantly better summaries when instructed to base the summaries on the major semantic roles within the passage. These summaries were significantly better than summaries based upon the traditional paragraph analysis of “topics” and “main ideas,” and they were significantly better than summaries written without any special instructions.     

Contextual cues and depth of processing in short prose passages

Two experiments compared context and depth-of-processing strategies applied to the learning of short aurally presented prose passages. In the first study, contextual orientation led to significantly higher recall than a continue-paragraph condition, and both strategy groups performed significantly better than a nonstrategy control group. In the second experiment, continuing paragraphs was superior to generating contextual theme statements, with both strategies again superior to the controls. These results were discussed in terms of the ways in which processing demands effect memory for connected discourse.     

Abused, neglected, and nonmaltreated preschoolers'' ability to discriminate emotions in others: The effects of IQ

Sixty children between the ages of 3 and 5 participated in this study of children's ability to discriminate emotions in others. Twelve children were identified as neglected, and eight were identified as abused. Two additional groups of nonmaltreated children included one comparable on IQ and one with significantly higher intelligence. All children were given three tests: The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, the Borke Interpersonal Awareness Test and the Rothenberg Social Sensitivity Test. The results showed that normal children with the higher IQ were significantly better able to identify and discriminate other people's emotions from picture stories than were the other groups of children, who were not different from one another on any of the measures. Furthermore, when IQ was covaried in the ANOVAS, all group-differences disappeared. It was suggested that previous studies demonstrating inferior performance on measures of social cognition by maltreated children may have been due to the failure to control for IQ.     

Models of the structure of some rule-governed mathematical behaviors

This study investigated the extent to which various latent class models adequately described some elementary rule-governed mathematical behaviors. Two hundred and eighty-three children were given a fraction concepts test in which they identified fractional parts of sets of objects. Results supported the adoption of a set of three-class models including a mastery class, a nonmastery class, and a transitional class to describe the data.     

Pictorial organization in prose learning

Ninety undergraduates of high and low prior knowledge of geology read a difficult prose passage concerning the formation of a meander. Two groups of learners were forced to process a map-like organizer either before or after they read the passage, while a control group was provided no pictorial support. The results showed that subjects with little prior knowledge who were provided with the organizer prior to reading recalled at a level similar to that of subjects with a good deal of background knowledge. The findings were interpreted as support for the use of map-like organizers in the primary position to aid comprehension.     

The influence of decision factors on what is reported in free recall of a brief narrative

In recent research on memory for prose, attention has focused on the influence of a reader's perspective or schema on what is encoded and subsequently recalled. Previous research has revealed that subjects were able to recall previously unrecalled information if they were directed to take a new perspective during a second recall trial. This has been termed the perspective shift effect. This paper describes two possible mechanisms to account for the perspective shift effect—a retrieval process and a decision process. Two experiments which investigated the roles of these processes in the perspective shift effect are described. Experiment 1 employed an incentive to influence the subjects' criterion for reporting recalled information. Experiment 2 obtained separate estimates for decision and memory processes by applying signal detection theory. The results of both experiments provide data that tend to rule out the decision process as an important factor in the perspective shift phenomena in recall.     

The effects of test expectations based upon goals on the free recall of learning from text

The number of facts college students correctly recalled was not affected by whether they were provided goals which did or did not encourage them to reorganize the passage material they studied. This held both for learners asked to recall all facts they could and those asked to recall only a portion of the goal-targeted facts. Learners whose recall exhibited reorganization of passage material did not differ in number of correctly recalled facts from those who failed to reorganize the passage material. Learners were more apt to reorganize the text materials when asked to recall only a portion of the goal-targeted facts than when asked to recall all facts they could. Self-report data suggest learners primarily use goals to rehearse the targeted material only after they carefully read a study passage.     

Peer priorities and the impact of academic achievement

The relationship between level of academic achievement and student self-concept was investigated. Based upon recent hypotheses concerning sex differences in the priority of academic accomplishments, it was predicted that the self-concept of older males and younger females would be most strongly influenced by the level of academic competence. This hypothesis was supported only for the male group. It was argued that younger males rather than older females were most debilitated by sex-role stereotypes.     

Cerebral laterality effects in the dual processing of prose

The degree to which the concreteness of prose material presented in an auditory fashion would interact with learners' lateral preference under different right hemispheric presentation conditions was investigated with 96 normal adults. Forty-eight subjects with consistent right preference patterns and a like number of bilateral individuals were either instructed to image, given a visual-spatial interference task, or given no instructions before listening to passages which differed in abstractness. As predicted across conditions, learners recalled a significantly greater number of ideas when the passage was concrete. Importantly, the abstractness was found to interact with subjects' inferred cerebral dominance. Whereas instructions to image and visual interference had little significant effect on mixed dominant subjects, for more consistently lateralized subjects imagery instructions increased and right-hemispheric interference decreased concrete recall. The results were interpreted in terms of visual and verbal encoding concomitant with cerebral lateralization.     

The role of objectives in guiding the organization of information learned from text

This study was designed to identify how objectives influence the organization of the information recalled from text. Three hypotheses were investigated: (1) that objectives affect the sequence of attention to information in text, (2) that they affect the sequence in which information is rehearsed during a review period, or (3) that they serve as a set of cues at retrieval. One hundred college students read objectives either before or after reading a passage (varying the opportunity for objectives to affect the sequence of attention). They then either had or did not have a review period (varying the opportunity to use objectives to sequence rehearsal and also varying the presence of the objectives in memory at the time of retrieval). One hundred more students read the passage in control conditions with objectives available throughout the reading or with no objectives available. Results showed that students given objectives after reading but before a review period had more clustering by objectives in free recall than did those who never saw objectives, supporting the hypothesis that organization by objectives occurs during rehearsal. No evidence was found to support the notion that organization by objectives occurs during encoding or retrieval phases.     

The role of fantasy figures in the regulation of young children's behavior: Santa Claus,the Easter Bunny,and donations

The present study examined the influence of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny on children's donations near the Easter season. Kindergarten and first-grade children were asked to tell stories about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or pets, for which they received nine pieces of gum. They were then encouraged to donate any amount of their gum to handicapped children. Main effects were found only for grade, with first-grade children donating significantly more than kindergarten children. In addition, a significant interaction was obtained between grade and type of story elicited from the child. This interaction revealed that for kindergarten children, the type of story failed to influence donations, whereas for first-grade children, stories referring to Santa Claus increased donations relative to stories told about the Easter Bunny or pets.     

The effects of effort feedback and performance patterns on children's attributions and task persistence

This study examines the effects of performance patterns (ascending versus random) and attributional information regarding the causes of that performance (effort feedback versus no feedback) on attributions and task persistence. Subjects were 40 fourth and fifth graders with dispositional tendencies not to perceive effort as a cause of their school-related performance. Results indicated that performance patterns did not systematically influence either children's attributions or persistence. As predicted, children given effort feedback exhibited greater levels of task persistence than those given no feedback; unexpectedly, however, this effect was not mediated by children's attributions.