This article reviews the literature that compares the instructional effectiveness of games to conventional classroom instruction. Studies dealing with empirical research rather than teachers'judgments are reviewed. Published reviews of research in English dating from 1963 to 1984 were examined and the literature was searched for studies from 1984 to 1991. Of the 67 studies considered over a period of 28 years, 38 show no difference between games and conventional instruction; 22 favor games; 5 favor games, but their controls are questionable; and 3 favor conventional instruction. Results for social sciences, math, language arts, logic physics, biology, retention over time, and interest are examined. Math is the subject area with the greatest percentage of results favoring games, but only eight studies have adequate controls. Thirty-three out of 46 social science games/simulations show no difference between games/simulations and classroom instruction. The authors conclude that subject matter areas where very specific content can be targeted are more likely to show beneficial effects for gaming.

The cognitive characteristics of paragraph comprehension items were studied by comparing models that deal with two general processing stages: text representation and response decision. The models that were compared included the prepositional structure of the text (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978), various counts of surface structure variables and word frequency (Drum et al., 1981), a taxonomy of levels of text questions (Anderson, 1972), and some new models that combine features of these models. Calibrations from the linear logistic latent trait model allowed evaluation of the impact of the cognitive variables on item responses. The results indicate that successful prediction of item difficulty is obtained from models with wide representation of both text and decision processing. This suggests that items can be screened for processing difficulty prior to being administered to examinees. However, the results also have important implications for test validity in that the two processing stages involve two different ability dimensions. Susan E. Whitely. This work was supported by the Navy Personnel Research and Development Center through the Army Research Office and Battelle Memorial Institute Contract No. 0855. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors, are not official, and do not reflect the views of the Departments of the Navy or Army.

Two experiments were conducted with a directed-forgetting paradigm to evaluate the degree of temporal information carried by the to-be-remembered (TBR) and the to-be-forgotten (TBF) items. The first experiment employed a serial position judgment task, and the second employed a pairwise comparison task under either primacy-or recency-judgment instructions. Both experiments showed that little temporal information was evidenced in the TBF items, whereas temporal'coding seemed to be "automatic" for the TBR items. Based upon these observations, a contextual association theory of temporal coding was proposed, which assumes "study-phase retrieval" as the basic mechanism for coding temporal relationships between items. Predictions generated from this theory were contrasted with those derived from a strength theory of recency judgment. Results from a critical experiment support contextual association theory and discredit strength theory.The ability of human subjects to detect the temporal relations among input events plays a very important role in the processing of information. In fact, almost every experiment in verbal learning and memory requires the presentation of a series of events distributed over some temporal interval. Research on encoding operations of human information processing indicates that coding of the to-be-remembered items always includes information about this "temporal" date of the occurrence of an item (e.g.

The role of differential rehearsal opportunity in the free recall of remember-(R) and forget-(F) cued words was investigated as a function of the method of presentation. As was found in previous experiments, the duration of the interval between a word and its cue had no effect on R-word recall when this interval was varied within a given list, this effect being attributed to additional rehearsal of the R words later in the list. However, varying the word-cue interval between lists having equivalent word-word intervals revealed that consistent immediate cuing produced both more efficient remembering and forgetting than did consistent delayed cuing. Furthermore, the superiority of consistent immediate cuing to delayed cuing was increased when different lists had greater time between words. These results were interpreted in terms of a timesharing control process in which subjects employ varying degrees of both maintenance and elaborative rehearsal schemes.

No abstract