This study was designed to assess developmental differences in the acquisition of information about strategy efficacy, information that could be gleaned from observing a peer model perform a memory task. Second-grade, seventh-grade, and college students watched a videotape of a model learning a list of paired-associate nouns via two differentially effective overt strategies, sentence elaboration (effective) and verbal repetition (ineffective). In two of three conditions, subjects also watched the model being tested for cued recall of the noun pairs (but without being able to hear the model's responses). Subjects in the instructed-to-monitor condition were told to monitor and record their own perceived performance while watching the model take the tests; subjects in the opportunity-to-monitor condition watched the model's tests, but were not instructed to monitor or record their own performance; and no-opportunity subjects did not watch the model being tested. Second graders exhibited no strategy-efficacy benefits from the vicarious test experience (i.e., from watching the model being tested). Seventh graders displayed evidence of both strategy-efficacy knowledge and effective-strategy selections in the two conditions where the vicarious test experience was provided. College students made effective-strategy selections even without the vicarious test experience, although they appeared to have gained some strategy-efficacy knowledge from it.

Eighth-grade students read passages that described three dichotomized attributes of eight North American minerals. One-third of the students were given instruction in the use of mnemonic techniques, combined with experimenter-provided mnemonic illustrations of the passage content; another third were told about the value of organizing and summarizing to-be-remembered factual prose material, combined with experimenter-provided “fact map” summaries; and a final third were given motivational instructions and told to apply their normal method(s) of study while reading the passages. Mnemonic instruction generally produced greater memory for the minerals’ attributes in comparison to the other two conditions. This was true whether the passage was organized by mineral name (Experiment 1) or by attribute (Experiment 2) both on an immediate identification test and on identification and recall tests administered 3 days later. Implications of the findings are discussed with specific regard to remembering scientific taxonomies and their associated facts.

In three experiments, fifth-grade children and college students watched a video-taped peer model executing two differentially effective associative-learning strategies. In two experimental conditions, feedback to subjects about the model's subsequent recall was varied to be either congruent or incongruent with reality; in two other conditions, no information about the model's recall performance was provided. Subjects were then asked to pick one of the two strategies for their own use, and to study and be tested on a new list of items. The major findings were that whereas the children did not capitalize on their available strategy-efficacy information when making their own strategy selections, college students did show some evidence of coordinating their perceptions of both the model's performance and their own performance on the model's test with selection of the more effective strategy. Consistent with previous data, a majority of both children and adults endorsed the more effective strategy following their own study/test experience.

Previous research has indicated that the keyword method of vocabulary learning facilitates students' performance not just on simple tests of definition recall, but on comprehension-demanding tasks as well. The present study was conducted to determine whether the “comprehension” finding could be accounted for by keyword subjects' superior definition recall per se. The results generally supported that conclusion: When conditions and subjects within conditions were equated with respect to their initial levels of definition recall, the comprehension advantage of keyword subjects disappeared.

Une imagerie a type de rebus («transformationnelle») fondee sur la figurabilite des phonemes composant les mots clefs du recit a ete utilisee pour aider au rappel d'une histoire par des enfants du premier cycle secondaire, par opposition a une imagerie classiquement representative des episodes de l'histoire

Fifth-grade students with either high or low levels of vocabulary knowledge were taught a list of new vocabulary words according to the mnemonic keyword method. The children were randomly assigned either to one of three keyword instructional conditions that varied in the degree of structure provided by the experimenter, or to a no-strategy control condition. All three variations of the keyword method facilitated students' vocabulary learning. Aptitude × treatment interactions involving vocabulary knowledge materialized, however, such that the degree of keyword method structure made far less of a difference for the high knowledge students than it did for the lows. In particular, when the children had to execute the dual components of the keyword method entirely on their own, low vocabulary knowledge students experienced considerably more difficulty than did highs.