Two experiments were conducted in an effort to combine a mnemonic strategy for remembering individual items with a mnemonic procedure for remembering, and reasoning about, inter-item relationships. In Experiment 1, students using the combined mnemonic approach were able to identify more individual items (fish names from their pictures) and were subsequently able to remember more components of six studied hierarchies (order, family, and species names of the fish) than did students in an ‘own best method’ control condition. Additionally, and importantly, mnemonic students outperformed control students on an analogy task requiring inferences about superordinate, subordinate, and coordinate relationships. In Experiment 2, the initial number of to-be-learned fish was reduced so that the performance of both mnemonic and control students was comparable with respect to fish identification. Despite such item-level comparability, an advantage for mnemonically instructed students was observed on both immediate and two-day-delayed hierarchy tests. We suggest that by cementing lower-order connections, mnemonic strategies facilitate students' learning of higher-order information. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Three experiments were conducted in which the face – name mnemonic technique was applied to learning the names of unfamiliar animals. In all three experiments, mnemonically instructed students outperformed ‘own best method’ controls on animal name-recognition tests when prompted by the animals' pictures. In addition, mnemonic students remembered more animal names than did controls when they were shown previously unseen variations of the studied animals (Experiments 2 and 3). The present results illustrate the effectiveness of associative mnemonic strategies in facilitating people's memory for unfamiliar pictorial stimuli in both their original and varied representations. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Current research and theory indicate that college students' scientific and statistical reasoning skills are deficient, but can be improved through instruction. Accordingly, an innovative statistics course was developed for the undergraduate education curriculum at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. The course promoted the idea “that the purpose of statistics is to organize a useful argument from quantitative evidence based on a form of principled rhetoric” ( Abelson, 1995 , pp. xiii). Most instruction was anchored to mentored, small-group collaborative activities that simulated complex, real-life problem solving. In conjunction with the second offering, evidence of student growth was obtained from pre- and post-course interviews designed to assess students' ability to reason with statistical evidence from everyday sources. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses indicated that students made meaningful gains in their ability to reason statistically. Analyses also pointed to specific conceptual confusions, some related to course design. Students' reactions Io the course were variable.

The authors conducted 4 experiments to examine mnemonic transfer in the form of knowledge generalization, in the context of an artwork-learning task. In each experiment, college students first studied a set of painting-artist name pairs using an adaptation of the face-name mnemonic technique. Immediate and 2-day delayed performance measures consisted of (a) tests over the studied paintings (memory) and (b) new tests over sets of nonstudied, yet thematically or stylistically similar, paintings by the same artists (transfer). In all 4 experiments mnemonic instruction produced memory benefits on a direct test over the studied paintings. Moreover, Experiments 1-3 indicated that on the transfer task mnemonic students who were directed to focus on the general theme or style of the artist outperformed both nonmnemonic control students and mnemonic students who focused on details of the paintings. Finally, the results of Experiment 4 further suggested that even when mnemonic-detail students are specifically informed about the nature of the forthcoming near-transfer task, their transfer performance is not facilitated.

One hundred 6th graders studied a list of new vocabulary items according to either a semantic-context or mnemonic Learning strategy, combined with either an individual or pair format for studying and testing. As has been demonstrated repeatedly in past research, substantial benefits were derived from mnemonic strategy use on measures of definition recall, as well as of students' ability to remember information from a narrative passage that featured the vocabulary items. This was true on both immediate and 1-week delayed performance tests. Mnemonically instructed students were also appropriately more confident of their correct responses and less confident of their incorrect responses. Of specific interest to the present study was that when a scripted pair-learning/testing format was also incorporated, selected vocabulary-learning benefits (relative to an individual learning format) were observed for both mnemonically and contextually instructed students. Moreover, in the mnemonic condition, studying as a pair and being tested individually was as effective as both studying and being tested as a pair, whereas in the context condition, studying and being tested as a pair was more effective than studying as a pair and being tested individually.

The comparative text-processing benefits of matrix structures, mnemonic representations, and their combination were examined in 3 experiments (1 with college students, 2 with 5th graders). The study's major findings permit the following conclusions: First, contrary to previous research on the topic, 2-dimensional matrices (whether in a verbal or pictorial format) produced only limited positive effects on students' text-learning performance, relative to either corresponding linear outlines or text alone. Second, and in contrast, appropriate mnemonic representations (whether individually presented or embedded in a matrix) did prove to be highly effective text-learning facilitators of students' memory and application in both individualand group-testing situations, both immediately following instruction and on 1 -week delayed tests. Third, relatively little advantage of the mnemonic matrix over individual mnemonic representations was detected.

Recent research has suggested that information acquired through the mnemonic keyword method fades rapidly as time goes by-especially in the absence of an immediate test. Five experiments were conducted to investigate various aspects of this issue and our results turned up the "usual suspects." That is, we found consistent mnemonic advantages in acquisition tall experiments) as well as delayed mnemonic advantages in cases where students received an immediate test on studied items (Experiments 2, 3, 4, and 5). Further, and of special interest here, even in the absence of an immediate test, we found delayed mnemonic advantages (Experiments 3, 4, and 5). Nevertheless, these positive delayed findings were tempered by the observation that, in terms of absolute number retained, there was a somewhat faster forgetting rate for mnemonic students in comparison to repetition controls. In our discussion, we examine other delayed-recall indicators (relative differences and conditional probabilities) in an effort to better compare the "forgetting" of mnemonic and repetition participants. A theoretical explanation for the fragility of mnemonic memories, and implications for future research, are provided. (C) 1998 Academic Press.

An introductory psychology course presents extensive new terminology to beginning students—a lexicon that may prove difficult to master. A useful technique in this regard is the mnemonic keyword method. However, because textbook examples often focus on the acquisition of foreign vocabulary, students and instructors may not see the relevance of the keyword method for the learning of terminology in psychology. To illustrate this connection, we provide a set of “neuromnemonic” material that we developed for terminology relaxed to the central nervous system. Furthermore, we describe a simple experiment in which we compared 2 versions of our keyword approach to a repetition condition. The 2 mnemonic approaches produced advantages on an immediate definition-memory test as well as on a task that required application of the material learned. These findings provide additional evidence that mnemonic strategies facilitate more than just rote memorization of facts.

High school students participated in two experiments designed to investigate application and transfer of a mnemonic strategy. On Day 1 of Experiment 1, mnemonically instructed students outperformed nonmnemonic control students on both recall and application tests for the initial task of learning passage-embedded information about features of fictitious cities. No evidence of successful strategy transfer was obtained, however, on Day 2 passages about several U.S. presidents. In Experiment 2, mnemonically instructed students again recalled and applied more Day 1 city information than did control students. Moreover, with Day 2 transfer passages that were less complex and more similar to the Day 1 cities passages, there was qualified support for the hypothesis that mnemonic students could transfer their previously learned strategy to a set of new materials: Successful transfer was observed when the students were given an explicit hint to try to use a strategy similar to the one they had used previously (prompted transfer), but not when no such hint was provided (spontaneous transfer).

The multiple-comparison procedure originally proposed by R. A. Fisher (1935) for the 1-way analysis of variance context has several desirable properties when K (the number of groups) is equal to 3. In this article, the logic of the procedure is described in conjunction with those properties. A discussion follows of how the Fisher procedure can be similarly applied in a number of other K=3 (and, more generally, 2-degree-of-freedom) hypothesis-testing situations. Finally, the Fisher logic is combined with recent sequential applications of the Bonferroni inequality to illustrate the utility and versatility of that combination for the applied researcher

Perhaps the classic introduction of mnemonic techniques to introductory psychology students is the textbook or the instructor describing a few simple examples. However, such examples may be insufficient to convince students of the utility of such techniques for their own learning. We offer supplementary instructional suggestions, along with specific examples, for enhancing students’ motivation to apply mnemonic strategies. First, confidence in the efficacy of mnemonic strategies is fostered through actual demonstrations, or mnemonstrations, initially provided by the instructor and then by the students themselves. Second, greater perceived personal relevance of mnemonic strategies is established by helping students apply the strategies directly to psychology course content on which they will be tested.

Prior research has documented the efficacy of an adaptation of the face-name mnemonic procedure for remembering who painted what painting - the kind of task encountered in an art appreciation class. Yet students are frequently called upon to do more than just remember names. For example, they may be required to remember when a painting was completed. Three experiments were conducted in an effort first to validate the phonetic (or digit-consonant) mnemonic system as a useful strategy and then to apply it to our artwork-learning task. Ultimately (Experiment 3), we combined the previous painting-artist mnemonic procedure (for learning names) with the phonetic mnemonic strategy (for learning dates) to facilitate memory for "who painted what when." Our results supported the use of the phonetic mnemonic system, as well as the combined mnemonic approach taken in Experiment 3.

Research on academic retention programs for at-risk minority college students suffers from a variety of methodological shortcomings. Several problems are identified in the context of published retention-program studies, followed by corresponding solutions framed within a call for nontraditional, alternative methodological and statistical strategies for retention-program research.

This article describes the Bonferroni multiple-comparison procedure, and makes a case for researchers’ more frequent and appropriate use of it. The procedure is discussed as a test that facilitates investigation of precise and powerful a priori multiple comparisons. Characteristics of the Bonferroni procedure are described in relation to the more familiar Scheffe post hoc multiple-comparison method, and a step-by-step guide for comparing and choosing between the two is provided. The Bonferroni procedure is discussed in detail in the context of one-factor analysis-of-variance designs. Application of the technique is then considered in the context of factorial designs, analyses of covariance, univariate repeated-measures analyses, multivariate analyses of variance, and recent sequential hypothesis-testing extensions. To aid the presentation, an example from the field of management is included.

The piece by Wang, Haertel, and Walberg (1993a), hereafter referred to as WHW, is both thoughtful and thought provoking. Impressive with respect to its operational magnitude, the WHW article is a certain-to-be-highly-cited study that will stimulate discussion-and stir controversy-in circles of academic, social, and political influence. Bear in mind, however, that this generally positive assessment of the contribution comes from an instructional psychologist whose predilections about the variables that should make a difference to the quality of school-learning outcomes were, in the main, the variables that emerged as having the strongest associations with improved school-learning outcomes in the WHW study. (The preceding sentence includes a couple of points that will be elaborated on in the commentary that follows.) What I hope to accomplish in the space provided is to focus on three general categories of reactions that were evoked by the WHW study, which can be summarized in the following questions: (1) Will the importance of the WHW findings/conclusions be underestimated? (2) Will the importance of the WHW findings/conclusions be overestimated? and (3) In future investigations of the factors that positively impact on school-learning outcomes, what can be done to prevent errors of both underand overestimation? In my comments, I respond directly to Questions 1 and 2; within each set of comments, I address (at least implicitly) Question 3.

The results of four experiments are reported, two with seventh- and eighth-grade students and two with third- and fourth-grade students. The purpose of Experiment 1 was to compare two student-generated vocabulary-learning strategies, sentence context and mnemonic keyword, under two alternative learning formats, individual and small group. The purpose of Experiment 2 was to compare experimenter-provided versions of the two strategies on vocabulary-usage test items that would ostensibly be most hospitable to the context strategy, namely sentence-comprehension items in which the originally learned contexts were reinstated. In Experiment 3, the small-group student-generated mnemonic vs context comparison was extended downward in age, from middle-school to elementary-school students. Finally, Experiment 4 compared both individual and student-pair versions of the student-generated mnemonic strategy with an individual free-study format. In each experiment, the durability of initial vocabulary-learning effects was assessed on the basis of delayed tests administered 3 days to 2 weeks later. In all experiments, mnemonic keyword students (whether individual, paired, or small group) outperformed their sentence-context and free-study counterparts on both immediate and delayed measures of definition recall. In addition, in three of the four experiments mnemonically instructed students were superior on tests of vocabulary usage (sentence and story comprehension).

Recent developments in procedures for conducting pairwise multiple comparisons of means prompted an empirical investigation of several competing techniques. Monte Carlo results revealed that the newer multistage sequential procedures maintain their familywise Type I error probabilities while exhibiting power that is superior to the traditional competitors. Of all procedures examined, the modified Peritz (1970) procedure (Seaman, Levin, Serlin, & Franke, 1990) is generally the most powerful according to all definitions of power. At the same time, when computational ease and convenience are taken into consideration, Hayter's (1986) procedure should be regarded as a viable alternative. Beyond pairwise comparisons of means, the versatile Holm (1979) procedure and its modifications (Shaffer, 1986) are very attractive insofar as they represent simple, yet powerful, data-analytic tools for behavioral researchers.