Conditioning to one member of a compound stimulus can be blocked by the presence of a second member to which the response was previously conditioned. This account of selective stimulus control can be used to explain the finding that pictures inhibit learning of written words if the relevant pictures and their verbal equivalents have been paired previously. We tested the blocking explanation of the picture-word problem with 8 mentally retarded students. Following baseline, each student was presented daily with four conditions in an alternating treatments design. In Condition A (blocking), a picture was presented alone and then was followed by the presentation of a picture and written word compound stimulus; in Condition B (blocking/control), a word was presented alone; in Condition C (blocking minimized), a word was enhanced in size and presented alone followed by the word and a picture; and, in Condition D (blocking minimized/control), the enhanced word was presented alone. Each stimulus was presented for 15 s. All students had the lowest percentage of words read correctly in the blocking condition, and all improved when blocking was minimized.. Six of 8 students reached their highest percentage of words read correctly in the two control conditions when the words were presented as a single stimulus without pictures. These results indicate that pictures inhibit some students' learning of new words; this may be due to the blocking of conditioning to written words by prior conditioning to pictures.

Past research on learning single words in the presence of pictures has suggested that the pictures can function as a blocking element which inhibits the development of an association between the written word and its spoken response. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the extra stimulus pictorial prompts can be arranged in a different manner which does not inhibit the learning of the words. Three presentation techniques were investigated using samples (N = 12) of kindergarten children: matching, matching with the fading of the pictorial stimulus prompts, and feedback cueing. The results showed that, in general, the best learning occurred in the absence of the pictorial prompts, that is, when the words were presented alone. In the case of the feedback cueing condition, however, this technique neutralised the blocking effect of the pictures and the performance was as good as the word-alone condition.

Teachers' attributions of responsibility for their occupational stress provide a conceptual framework for investigation of this phenomenon. Teachers attribute responsibility for their occupational stress to entities increasingly 'distant' from themselves. The association of occupational stress with job satisfaction is investigated in terms of this framework and some significant differences for biographical variables are reported.

The cumulative hierarchical assumption of Bloom's Taxonomy was tested by orienting American and Australian subjects at four Taxonomic levels (Knowledge, Application, Synthesis, Evaluation) to the same study material and subsequently administering an unexpected memory test. With the exception of the Evaluation category, recall generally increased, as predicted, as Taxonomic level increased. Bloom's Taxonomy appears to possess some cross-national validity, at least for the two nationalities sampled, since the overall recall performance of the Americans and Australians was quite similar. In general, moderate support is obtained for the cumulative hierarchical assumption, but it is concluded that the Evaluation category is misplaced as the apex level of the Taxonomy.Part of the data reported in the present study formed the basis of a thesis submitted by Ronald Cohen to the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the master's degree.Requests for reprints should be sent to

No abstract