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Students' memories and learning strategies are situated in their social relationships, political orientations, cultural meanings, worldviews, and historical experiences. This study uses qualitative research methods to investigate how Canadian students remember and learn about the War on Terror. It deals with the narratives of ninety-nine students studying in an urban university of Ontario. I find that apart from textual resources, remembering and learning involve a collectivity of significant "others" or what I call interpretative communities. These communities play an influential role in the consumption and negotiation of knowledge inside and outside the classrooms thus an understanding of their role may help teachers to enhance their instructional strategies. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

In our exploration of the order of operations we focus on the following claim: "In the conventional order of operations, division should be performed before multiplication." This initially surprising claim is based on the acronym BEDMAS, a popular mnemonic used in Canada to assist students in remembering the order of operations. The claim was voiced by a teacher and then presented for consideration to a class of prospective elementary school teachers. We investigate the participants' understanding of the order of operations, focusing on the operations of multiplication and division. We report on participants' ways of resolving a cognitive conflict faced as a result of relying on memorized mnemonics.

The production effect is the substantial benefit to memory of having studied information aloud as opposed to silently. MacLeod, Gopie, Hourihan, Neary, and Ozubko (2010) have explained this enhancement by suggesting that a word studied aloud acquires a distinctive encoding record and that recollecting this record supports identifying a word studied aloud as "old." This account was tested using a list discrimination paradigm, where the task is to identify in which of 2 studied lists a target word was presented. The critical list was a mixed list containing words studied aloud and words studied silently. Under the distinctiveness explanation, studying an additional list all aloud should disrupt the production effect in the critical list because remembering having said a word aloud in the critical list will no longer be diagnostic of list status. In contrast, studying an additional list all silently should leave the production effect in the critical list intact. These predictions were confirmed in 2 experiments. (Contains 1 table.)

Introduction: To engage effectively and efficiently in self-directed learning and knowledge-seeking practices, it is important that physicians construct well-formulated questions; yet, little is known about the quality of good questions and their relationship to self-directed learning or to change in practice behavior. Methods: Personal learning projects (PLPs) submitted to the Canadian Maintenance of Certification program were examined to include underlying characteristics, quality of therapeutic questions (population, intervention, comparator, outcome [PICO] mnemonic), and relationships between stage of change and level of evidence used to resolve questions. Results: We assessed 1989 submissions (from 559 Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada [RCPSC]). The majority of submissions were by males (69.2%) aged 40-59 (59.4%) with an average of 24.3 (range 6-58, SD 11.1) years since graduation. The most frequent submissions were treatment (36.6%) and diagnosis (22.3%) questions. Half of all questions described [greater than or equal to] 2 components (PICO), and only 3.7% of questions included all 4 components. Cross tabulations indicated only 1 significant trend for the use of narrative reviews and the outcome "integrating new knowledge" (P less than 0.000). Discussion: Self-directed learning skills comprise an important strategy for specialists maintaining or expanding their expertise in patient care, but an important obstacle to answering patient care questions is the ability to formulate good ones. Engagement in most major learning activities is stimulated by management of a single patient: formal accredited group learning events are of limited value in starting episodes of self-directed learning. Low levels of evidence used to address learning projects. Future research should determine how best to improve the quality of questions submitted and whether or not these changes result in increased efficiencies, more appropriate uses of evidence, and increased changes in practice behaviors. (Contains 5 tables.)

The effectiveness of using verbal repetition and first-letter acronyms to teach a common marketing framework was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, 345 undergraduate students were exposed to the framework using one of four conditions: control, verbal repetition, acronym, and verbal repetition plus acronym in a traditional learning setting. Students were tested for unaided recall of the concepts as well as concept application and analysis. Results indicate that using acronyms increased student scores at 2 weeks and 3 months for both unaided recall and analysis, but verbal repetition had no significant effect, either alone or in conjunction with the acronym. Experiment 2 tested the impact of acronym use in an active learning setting. Here, 129 undergraduate students were exposed to the framework using only an active learning method or the active learning method plus an acronym. Students were tested for unaided recall and concept application and analysis at 2 weeks and 3 months after exposure. Use of the acronym increased scores for both unaided recall and concept application and analysis compared to the active learning method alone. Implications for teaching strategies are discussed. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

The mnemonic keyword method was modified to help French-speaking undergraduates at a Canadian university learn the meaning and the grammatical gender of German nouns. Results bear on the encoding and retrieval of complex associations between a German noun and its grammatical gender. (TJH)

A set of immediate memory-span tests, concept- and rule-learning tasks, and an IQ test were administered to adolescents. A color-form memory factor and IQ substantially predicted rule-learning proficiency. Effects of memory aids appeared to induce conceptual rules and serve as a base for rehearsing information. (Author/RD)

Investigated the hypothesis that age deficits in long-term episodic memory tasks are due to impaired metamemorial skills. Both young and old adults were able to predict their ability to recall. Concluded that differences in metamemorial skills are not responsible for age differences in memory. (Author)

Compares the performance of preschool and kindergarten children who were presented with 18 paired associates to learn under three conditions: control, mnemonic test-time instructions, and mnemonic plus retrieval instructions. Results are consistent with the claim that younger children need more explicit prompts. (RH)

A course I took from Wallace Lambert in 1954 at McGill required a novel experiment. Lambert encouraged me to investigate language learning implications of a French-English difference in grammatical habits whereby, in English, descriptive adjectives typically precede the nouns they modify whereas the reverse order is typical in French. A language habits hypothesis thus suggests that unfamiliar phrases would be easiest to remember in their language-typical grammatical order. A mnemonic technique with which I was familiar uses concrete nouns as memory pegs (reminders) for associated information, suggesting that, by analogy, the noun-adjective order would be favored in language memory regardless of language habits. An experiment I devised clearly supported the prediction from the memory-peg hypothesis. Later, tests of that hypothesis and other variants led to the development of a general dual coding theory (DCT) of cognition that entails the cooperative interplay of verbal and nonverbal mental processes in memory, language, and thought. In the extended program, Lambert and I collaborated on experiments involving bilingual memory and cognition that supported DCT and its extension to bilingualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Canada and the United States the transformative value of a photograph was quickly recognized for nation building, and this new invention soon served a purpose in public memory. Its uses expanded from surveying lands to promoting population growth, tourism, artistic expression and to imagining virtual communities. Photography's narrative, however, offers readers a commentary on knowledge, identity and memory within an interactive space that is a dialogue between subject and photographer and a visual ‘writing the body’. A subject's presence and intentionality through this ‘writing the body’ is a significant locus for knowledge and alterity - the construction of cultural otherness. Indigenous people viewing early photographs of family members may glimpse past a genre's rhetoric and actually experience their people in a lived historical moment. This essay examines the genre rhetoric of E.S. Curtis's photographs and Indigenous ‘writing the body’ as a source of mnemonic knowledge. Photography addresses our senses and extends them while it gives form to a knowledge of being in a photographic hypertext that evokes public memory and references the personal, social and political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]