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Three strategies frequently employed in individualized instruction were tested in a three-way repeated measures design that involved eight computer exercises over a period of 6 weeks. Exercises compared individual with paired study, pretests with no pretests, and serial with parallel mastery. Posttests revealed an advantage for individual study and parallel mastery, while pretesting had no lasting effect. Questionnaire preferences for paired study improved under conditions of increased cognitive strain. A mechanism involving working memory is proposed and implications for both individualized and grouped instruction are discussed. (Author)

Two conflicting hypotheses were investigated in this study. The first is based on an interference theory of forgetting and assumes that forgetting is largely a function of proactive interference, i.e., a result of interference by previously learned material. The second is based on the improvement of memory due to basic mechanisms that may operate to produce marked increases in retentive abilities over the first few years of a child's life. The subjects were 45 kindergartners and 45 third graders randomly assigned to three experimental groups. The experimental conditions varied the amount of retention time between the original learning task and the retention tests. The retention intervals were six minutes, 48 hours, and four weeks. The learning task was a list of four paired associates. In each pair, the response term was a high frequency, one-syllable English noun and the stimulus term was the Latin equivalent. The learning task and the retention tests were all conducted orally. The number of items correct on the three retention tests served as the dependent measure for analysis. The results indicated that when the degree of original learning is equated, children as young as five years of age can remember materials as well as third-graders over a retention interval as long as four weeks. (WR)

These proceedings emphasize multidisciplineary theory and research having implications for behavioral science and/or education. The contributions deal with one or more of the following questions: (1) How can one characterize the knowledge structures which underlie behavior associated with subject matter disciplines such as mathematics and language? How can one evaluate alternative characterization? (2) How can one determine the knowledge given individuals have at their command? (3) What are the mechanisms of performance, learning, memory, and perception as they involve structured knowledge? (4) What are the instructional conditions which control the acquisitions of structures? The proceedings contain 34 complete papers and summaries, including contributions by Banerji, Brainerd, Dienes, Fischer, Kopstein, Landauer, Merrill, Newell, Pask, Scandura, Shaw, Wilson, and Witz, and (edited) transcriptions of two discussion sessions, including Beilen, Fischer, and Minsky on "How Does Learning Take Place?" and "Theoretical Issues in Structural Learning." (Author)

The hypotheses that there will be a significant difference (1) in the number of responses generated according to economic issues, (2) in the number of responses generated according to social issues, (3) in the number of responses generated between the category of economic issues and the category of social issues, (4) in cue ranking by response frequency between economic and social issues, (5) in cue ranking of importance by subjects on economic and social issues, and (6) subject ranking of cue importance and frequency of cue importance on economic and social issues were tested in this study. Three social issues (gun control, student busing, and air pollution) and three economic issues (unemployment, government loans to big business, and wage and price control) were chosen. A total of 45 college freshmen responded to the social issues, and 45 freshmen responded to the economic issues. After the subjects responded to all of the issues, their responses were collected and the subjects were given a list of cues and were asked to rate each cue in terms of its importance in generating responses. The results indicated that cues tend to be topic bound and that there is a correlation between perception of cue importance and actual use of cue in generating responses. (WR)

The focus of this study was on the effects which knowledge of semantic components may have on recall. It was hypothesized that after an introduction to discourse structures immediate recall would improve and recall which was delayed for one week would improve. Thirty-four unpaid volunteers between the ages of 16 and 26 were recruited and randomly assigned to an experimental and a control group. Twenty-three of the subjects were high school advanced placement students. Seven semantic categories were taught to each subject in the experimental group: agent, instrument, location, benetive, factitive, and essive. Subjects then read passages of about 330 words. The results indicated that immediate recall scored for idea units was insignificantly better for the experimental group when compared with the untutored control group. One week delayed recall significantly favored the experimental group. The results were considered important for psycholinguistic theory and for education. (WR)

This study tested the following hypotheses: (1) that children would use both verbal-associative and acoustic memory attributes when encoding words in memory, and that the recall of younger children would indicate dominance of the acoustic attribute while the recall of older children would indicate dominance of the verbal-associative attribute; (2) that there would be more rapid forgetting of the acoustic attribute during a delayed retention interval; and (3) that older subjects would evidence a higher degree of clustering of conceptually-related words and that younger subjects would produce a higher degree of clustering of rhyme-related words. A total of 284 third and sixth graders served as subjects. All subjects received the same treatment. Three word lists were developed, two of which were constructed with words whose relationship would reflect one of the memory attributes under investigation. The subjects learned and were tested on each of the three lists according to a standard free recall procedure. The results indicated that the subjects recalled conceptually-related and rhyme-related words significantly better than control words, and that children of elementary school age made use of these attributes in recalling organized verbal materials. (WR)

This study investigated the facilitative effects of the loci system using mental imagery for acquisition and recall within a retroactive inhibition (RI) paradigm. Fifty-five college undergraduates were randomly assigned to five treatment conditions. Four groups formed cells in a 2x2 factorial design which included (1) an RI factor (AB-AD vs. AB-CD), (2) a subject-generated vs. experimenter-supplied loci list (loci-generation factor); and (3) repeated measures for uncued and cued recall. The fifth group was a comparison control in which subjects merely learned and recalled word lists B and D without the aid of the loci mnemonic technique. The object names used to form word lists B and D were high imagery and concreteness nouns. The loci-generated group subjects visualized 12 locations in a setting with which they were highly familiar. This became word list A. The subjects in the AB-CD condition generated word list C in the same manner but in a different setting and with none of the words used in list A. Subjects were shown either list A or list C, and after achieving perfect recall were required to perform an uncued recall pairing those items with list B, followed by cued recall. The findings supported the conclusion that the loci mnemonic technique is of value in aiding recall. (WR)

This paper reports on two experiments conducted in an attempt to extend findings by Ellis which suggest a rehearsal deficit in mentally retarded subjects. In experiment one, mentally retarded subjects saw nine stimuli in a serial position probe task for either two, four, or six seconds each. Performances for the two and four second-per-item rates of presentation did not differ and were similar to those obtained by Ellis for rates of presentation of two seconds or less. However, when stimuli were shown for six seconds each, performance was facilitated. In experiment two, seven stimuli were presented at rates of four, six, or eight seconds per item. During this interval stimuli were exposed for either two seconds or for the entire interval. The eight-second presentation rate was superior for both exposure durations to the four- and six-second rates, which did not differ from each other. (Author/WR)

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of adjunct aids in the form of questions on ninth graders' comprehension of 3,500-word passages. Specifically, the study focused on the effect on literal comprehension of content and process stimulus questions written at the cognitive levels of memory and evaluation when positioned before and after segments of a passage. Five questions were asked and answered as follows: students' literal comprehension of a passage was not significantly affected by different levels of stimulus questions (memory and evaluation); students' literal comprehension of a passage was not significantly affected by different types of stimulus questions (content and process); students' literal comprehension of a passage was not significantly affected by different positions of stimulus questions (before and after); no interaction effects were found among the three experimental factors; and students' literal comprehension of the passage was not significantly different when students responded to stimulus questions and others did not respond to stimulus questions. (WR)

Reported is another study related to the Project on an Information Memory Model. The purpose of this study was to establish the possible relationships of personality characteristics with the processing of information by humans in an abstract problem solving task. Thirty senior high school students, each of whom had completed the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule (EPPS), were asked to take the role of court judge, deciding on divorce proceedings and custody assignments. The subjects were presented with a problem involving the incestuous relationship between nine people who had Greek-letter names. The subjects vocalized the five-minute solution and the monologues were noun, pronoun analyzed. Twenty-eight information theoretic measures and six external measures were calculated from the Gamma Problem (output was placed in a matrix and treated for information theoretic measures according to the Moser Model). Fifteen personality variables were obtained from the EPPS; nine were used in the analysis. The information theoretic measures, the external measures, and the personality variables were tested for relationships by linear regression analysis. Paradigms, involving data analyses, of the relationships of personality to the information in verbal solutions of the Gamma problem confirmed that personality was embedded in the fashioning of sequences of messages from the memory and for processing a desired state of affairs for a socially sensitive problem. (Author/PEB)

Reported is another study related to the Project on an Information Memory Model. This study involved using information theory to investigate the concepts of primacy and recency as they were exhibited by ninth-grade science students while processing a biological sorting problem and an immediate, abstract recall task. Two hundred randomly selected students were given a biologically oriented classification sorting problem which required them to observe, for 15 minutes, a color slide composed of 14 different animals commonly recognized by ninth-grade students. Student scores were divided into low and high primacy (recall of items early in a list) and into low and high recency (recall of those items at the end of a list) groups. There were generally no significant differences between the low and high groups (primacy and recency) with respect to their set formation scores. When the groups were segregated on the basis of their ability to recall, there were significant differences between high and low groups. Total cognition scores were slightly greater for the recency students when compared to the corresponding ability group for primacy, suggesting that a slight but not significant advantage in recall belonged to the recency group. (Author/PEB)

To determine the ability of both black and white children to repeat sentences which conform to the grammatical rules of standard versus nonstandard English, and to examine how attendance at racially and socioeconomically integrated versus segregated schools affected performance in standard and nonstandard English, third and fourth graders were divided into four groups. Groups 1 and 2 consisted of 80 black children from low-income homes. About half of these children had attended an integrated school in a suburban area since their entrance into school. The remaining children had attended an all-black school in their own neighborhood. Groups 3 and 4 consisted of 60 middle-income, mostly white children, who had attended a segregated school in their own neighborhood. Results revealed that black, low-income children performed significantly better than white, middle-class income children in recalling nonstandard sentences. Black, low-income children who had attended an integrated school were both better on standard and poorer on nonstandard sentences than similar children who had attended a segregated school. (SW)

The effects of imagery on the recognition of subunits within a textual passage were investigated. College students first rated the subunits of a textual passage with respect to imagery. A different group of subjects was then given the passage to read, and these subjects were subsequently tested for recognition, either immediately or one week later. Recognition performance for the immediate test group was superior to that of the one-week delay test group. In addition, subjects correctly recognized more of the subunits read high in imagery. Implications for future research and education were discussed. (Author)

The transformation of episodic inputs to semantic representations was studied in two very similar tasks. In one, subjects were required to infer the underlying four-term linear ordering from three comparative sentences such as, "The teacher is taller than the doctor." In the second task, subjects inferred underlying 4- and 5-digit strings, e.g., 5719, from series of three or four digit pairs, such as 57, 71, 19 or 19, 57, 71. In both tasks, variations in input order produced large, significant differences in the proportion of orders or strings correctly constructed. The following principle explains a major feature of these data as well as many of the errors subjects made: "As the twig is bent, so the tree's inclined." (Author)

In an attempt to ascertain the facilitating functions of audiovisual between-channel redundancy in information processing, a series of audiovisual experiments alternating auditory and visual as the dominant and redundant channels were conducted. As predicted, results generally supported the between-channel redundancy when input (stimulus) was beyond the human information processing capacity. Data were also interpreted in terms of various theories such as the lower threshold, summation, energy integration, cumulative strength, cuing, and multiple traces of the audiovisual bisensory presentation, implicitly supporting between-channel redundancy. Evidence obtained from the study was also dismetrically opposite to the hypothesis that short-term memory was essentially an auditory system. Based on findings in neurophysiology, it was argued that both short-term memory and long-term memory might very well be integrated systems. Some conflicting evidence was also found on the position of redundant information of one channel in relation to the other channel. Redundant information coinciding with the dominant channel in the beginning was found significantly better than that at the end with the digit-recall tasks, but not with letter-recall tasks. (Author/SW)

This paper examines several recent lines of research concerning category clustering and describes an alternative to the standard category clustering procedure used to study recall organization in younger children. The specific issue considered is the age at which children first show evidence of spontaneous category clustering in their free-recall. Possible interpretations of the contrasting results presented in the literature focus on the types of organizational behaviors measured by the clustering index: (1) associative modes, or (2) conceptual modes. Examples from research are presented to illustrate the distinction between associative and conceptual clustering. It is concluded that there is no way to distinguish associative from conceptual modes of spontaneous organization at any age level when using traditional measures of clustering. An alternative clustering measure, which employs a sorting-recall procedure, is proposed and described. Results of using this procedure, which differ on several dimensions with previous results, are reported. The advantages of using this sorting-recall procedure include: (1) the determination of particularly meaningful age trends; (2) the provision of important information about the qualities of organizational processing; and (3) the opportunity to determine the category basis and criteria used in grouping items. (SDH)

This study used five cueing systems composed of 16 cues each in combination with three topical areas to form cue-topic pairs which acted as stimulus items for the retrieval of naturally stored information. The five cue systems were composed of: randomly selected words, randomly selected nouns, the Wilson and Arnold system, a modification of the Kant system of "categories of understanding," and the subject's own self-generating cues. On the basis of a frequency ranking, subjects from the same population as the experimental sample ranked three topics from a list of 20. A repeated measures design was used where subjects in each one of the cue system's groups were in a random order presented the same 16 cues three times, each time with a different one of the three topics forming 48-cue topic pairs overall. The results indicated that the subject's own self-generated cue system significantly facilitated a retrieval of naturally stored information as compared to the other four cue systems. There were no significant differences in the cue systems: random word, random noun, Wilson and Arnold, and Kant with respect to the facilitation of items or information retrieved. (Author/WR)

This study was designed to test the effects of message summaries on the recall of main points of an informative message. Two different types of summary techniques, a mnemonic and a traditional type, were identified and compared with each other and with a third treatment involving no summaries. One hundred and eleven volunteer subjects were randomly assigned to the three treatments and were given the "Goyer Organization of Ideas Test," which was used as a covariate. Although previous studies showed no effect of summaries on recognition as measured by multiple-choice tests, it appears that summaries are a significant aid to recall of the main points of a message. Further, some summaries seem to be more effective than others, as shown by the significantly higher recall scores of subjects who heard the mnemonic summaries versus subjects who heard the traditional summaries. (Author/RB)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the function of memory as an underlying psychological process in human communicative behavior by offering a theoretical framework derived from communication literature. Divided into two sections, the paper deals with "The Psychology of Memory: Some Basic Propositions," which reviews the literature on the capacity and limitations of human information processing abilities, and "A Functional Model of Memory in Communication," which details a theoretical model of the role of memory in human communication and includes a schematic drawing to facilitate understanding. (RB)

This study investigated the specific learning abilities and general adjustment of 50 children, 5-14 years of age, who had pyloric stenosis (PS) in infancy, compared to 44 siblings and 50 matched control children. PS involves a period of brief starvation in early infancy, unrelated to socioeconomic conditions and is surgically correctable. The major questions posed by this study were: Does a defined period of starvation occuring within the first 3 months after birth have an effect on subsequent learning abilities and general adjustment? (2) If so, which specific abilities are most affected? All learning abilities measured were significantly correlated with the degree of starvation severity in infancy. Starvation causing a reduction of over 10 percent of the expected body weight in infancy was associated with poorer learning abilities, especially those involving short term memory and attention. (Author/CS)

This paper presents a review of research in which correlations between short term visual memory and reading achievement have been found. Included is a table summarizing the major research which made use of commercially available tests of short term visual memory suitable for use with children 8-years of age and older. The researcher, tests used, subject characteristics, and results are given for each experiment. Research relating to the development of a motor-free, multiple-choice visual memory scale, which eliminates the developmental biases of the commercial tests and is, therefore, suitable for 5-, and 6-year-olds, is described in greater detail. Several experiments are described which sought to remediate visual memory problems through visual mnemonic devices and visual memory training. It is concluded that a great deal more research in these areas is necessary. (ED)