William D. Rohwer

Elaboration and Learning in Childhood and Adolescence

Publisher Summary This chapter highlights both strengths and weaknesses of the elaboration hypothesis that accounts for behavior in learning and memory tasks. The device of classifying experimental manipulations in terms of the explicitness of elaborative prompts is useful for organizing and comparing the results of a number of investigations that are otherwise very heterogeneous. The classification scheme has also been helpful in dramatizing (a) the shift in the efficacy of explicit prompts during the childhood period; (b) the marked increase in the effectiveness of minimal prompts across the period of adolescence; and (c) the wide generality of the pattern of prompt effects during childhood in contrast to the population-specific character of the pattern during adolescence. Much additional verification, however, is needed for the assertion that the early childhood shift relates to the development of conceptual capacity, while the adolescent shift pertains to the development of an enduring propensity. A final feature of the elaboration hypothesis may be the most important: it emphasizes the research task of isolating external conditions necessary to activate a single underlying process rather than raising the issue of the modality of underlying processes.

Constraint, syntax and meaning in paired-associate learning

The phenomenon of sentential facilitation of paired-associate learning was investigated by dividing 224 sixth-grade Ss into 14 groups according to the character of verbal pretraining provided. Subjects were given pretraining that consisted of pre-exposure to verbal strings, each of which contained one of the eight pairs of nouns to be learned. Three properties of these verbal strings were manipulated: Meaningfulness, Syntactic Structure, and Constraint. Pre-exposure to verbal strings facilitated the learning of paired associates only when the strings were characterized by both meaningfulness and syntactic structure. The experiment also produced empirical support for the notion of constraint. A continuum of facilitation was detected, in which verbs produced the greatest facilitation, prepositions a median amount, and conjunctions the least.

Verbal mediation in paired-associate and serial learning

Summary On the basis of circumstantial evidence gleaned largely from the recent literature on transfer between paired-associate (PA) and serial learning, it was hypothesized that one difference between PA and serial learning involves the relative importance of verbal mediational processes. It was suggested that mediated associative processes play a more prominent role in PA learning than in serial learning. The S s used to investigate this hypothesis were mentally retarded adults, in whom the tendency spontaneously to use verbal mediators seemed to be minimal. In Exp. I 20 S s learned PA tasks composed of pictures of common objects; they learned either with or without instructions intended to prompt the use of verbal mediation. Under mediation instructions the S s learned PA lists much faster than they did without such instructions. In Exp. II four groups of retarded S s (total N = 40), matched for IQ, were divided into four experimental conditions: (1) serial task with mediation instructions; (2) serial task without mediation instructions; (3) PA task with mediation instructions; and (4) PA task without mediation instructions. It was found that the mediation instructions greatly facilitated PA learning but had no effect whatsoever on serial learning. Retest of the same S s approximately 10 days later, without mediation instructions and using equivalent forms of the PA learning task, revealed little if any tendency for the retarded S s to retain the technique of using verbal mediation in PA learning.

Relationships among student characteristics, study activities, and achievement as a function of course characteristics*

A battery of instruments were administered to 1240 junior high, senior high, and college students to assess their academic aptitude, self-efficacy, achievement orientation, and course-specific study actities. Also assessed were characteristics of the 22 social science courses within which these students were enrolled. The results revealed (a) an increase in demand for information capacity between junior and senior high school and an increase in demand on integration activities between junior high school and college; (b) significant positive correlations between academic achievement and both academic aptitude and self-efficacy ratings; (c) an interaction, across grade levels, between achievement orientation scales and achievement; (d) different patterns of relationships between the student characteristic measures and study scales across grade levels; and (f) some indication that grade-related differences in course features may account for these grade-related differences in the pattern of correlations between student characteristics and study activities.

What is learned in serial learning?1

Summary A transfer experiment was performed under conditions that would permit S s who first had learned a serial list to a criterion of mastery to “use” either positional associations or sequential S-R associations in the subsequent learning of paired associates (PAs) formally comprised of the same S-R connections existing in the piror Ser list. The principal results were as follows: (a) There was no significant over-all transfer from Ser to PA learning, in terms of total trials to criterion, for either the Positional or Sequential conditions. (b) There was significant Ser to PA transfer for both conditions only in the first third of the trials to criterion, after which transfer rapidly declined to zero. The Positional and Sequential conditions did not differ significantly in this respect. (c) The percentage of transfer is significantly related to serial position; those items at the beginning and end of the Ser list show positive transfer and those in the middle show zero or negative transfer. The results were interpreted as supporting neither the position association nor the S-R “chain” association conceptions of Ser learning, and an alternative hypothesis was proposed for further consideration.

Verbal and pictorial facilitation of paired-associate learning.

Abstract A developmental comparison has been made of the efficacy of verbal and pictorial methods of facilitating paired-associate learning in children. Each of a total of 432 first-, third-, and sixth-grade children learned a list of 24 pictures of paired objects presented by a pairing-test procedure for four trials. The first of two principal independent variables. Verbalization, concerned the type of verbal deseription given for the pairs (Naming, Conjunction string, Preposition string, Verb string). The second independent variable. Depiction, contrasted three kinds of pictorial representations of the pairs, each of which was a visual translation of one of the verbal descriptions provided (Coineidental, Locational, Actional). The results indicated that the facilitory effects of these verbal and pictorial factors are equal and parallel No interaction with grade level was obtained.

Grade level differences in students' study activities as a function of course characteristics

A self-report method was used to assess the frequency of engagement in 15 varieties of study activities by 1240 junior high, senior high, and college students enrolled in 22 social science courses. Also assessed, by means of observations and document analyses, were 14 characteristics of these courses. The results revealed (a) a comparatively low incidence of engagement in planful and generative study activities, (b) an increase in engagement in such activities across grade levels, (c) parallel increases across levels in course demands for and support of engagement in these activities, (d) substantial variation between courses within grade level in study-activity engagement, but (e) only inconsistent relationships between course-to-course engagement variation and course differences in demands and supports.

The Development of Elaborative Propensity in Adolescence.

Abstract A series of three experiments was conducted to verify the hypothesis that age differences in paired-associate learning proficiency across adolescence stem from the development of increasing elaborative propensity. An auxiliary aim was to determine whether previous study-to-study discrepancies in the pertinent age functions should be attributed to corresponding variations in learning materials or in characteristics of the populations sampled. Taken together, the results of the experiments provided support for the hypothesis. They also indicated, however, that students in late adolescence vary markedly in elaborative propensity, to the point that a substantial proportion of them are hardly distinguishable from preadolescents.

Form class and intralist similarity in paired-associate learning

Eight paired nouns were learned by 112 sixth-grade Ss under one or another of seven different experimental conditions in which the task was administered by a study-trial, test-trial method. On every study trial, each pair of nouns was presented in the context of a grammatical string of words and the experimental conditions were distinguished by differences in the composition of these strings. The form class of connectives was varied by comparing conjunctions, prepositions and verbs, and the intralist similarity of the strings was varied by manipulating the number of different words used as connectives within a list (two vs. four vs. eight). Preposition and verb connectives produced more rapid learning than conjunctions, regardless of the number of different connectives used. Thus, intralist similarity was rejected as an explanation of the inferiority of conjunction strings.

Context effects in the initial storage and retrieval of noun pairs

An experiment was performed to determine the loci at which sentence contexts facilitate PA learning. The task given to 208 fifth- and sixth-grade children was that of learning 14 pairs of high-frequency nouns by a one-trial, study-test method. The principal independent variables were: the locus of presentation of the verbal context (study trial vs. test trial vs. both); and, the type of context (conjunction phrase vs. simple declarative sentence). For an outside control group, verbal context was not provided on the study trial nor on the test trial. In comparison with the control group, facilitation was produced only by sentence contexts and only when such contexts were provided during the study trial. The magnitude of facilitation was greater when the sentences were presented on both the study and test trials than when presented during the study trial alone. A mediation hypothesis is offered to account for the results.