The present study reports the development of a theoretically motivated measure that provides estimates of a preschooler's ability to recall auditory text, to make text-based inferences, to access knowledge from long-term memory, and to integrate this accessed knowledge with new information from auditory text. This new preschooler component processes task is based on measures developed by Hannon and Daneman (2001) and August, Francis, Hsu, and Snow (2006), but it uses pictures and auditory text to make it more suitable for children 4–6 years of age. The results show that the new task is suitable for understanding the contributions of higher level processes to performance on a measure of language comprehension. In fact, it appears to be a better predictor of language comprehension performance than it is a measure of working memory. In addition, its medium-knowledge integration component is a good predictor of performance on a composite measure of fluid intelligence. Finally, a factor analysis reveals 3 separate clusters of abilities: word decoding skills, higher level processes associated with text-based processing, and higher level processes associated with accessing prior knowledge.
For many students concepts like fluid and crystallized intelligence are difficult to learn because they have highly-similar definitions that are easy to confuse. The challenge of learning these highlysimilar, yet often confused concepts is further complicated by the fact that students are tested on exams about differences between the concepts. In this theoretically-motivated research we test a new strategy for learning highly-similar pairs of concepts, called differential-associative processing. The results revealed that performance on multiple-choice questions was higher when students learned highly-similar concepts using differential-associative processing rather than a strategy of their own choice, text-based elaboration, or identifying similarities and differences. The results also revealed that students spontaneously transferred differential-associative processing to a neutral control condition. Taken as a whole, the present study supports differential-associative processing as a useful strategy for learning similar concepts.In educational settings students are often expected to learn pairs of concepts like proactive and retroactive interference. For many students these pairs of concepts are difficult to learn because they have highly-similar definitions that are easy to confuse. The challenge of learning these highly-similar, yet often confused concepts is further complicated by the fact that students are often inundated on tests with questions that assess differences between the concepts. Indeed a preliminary analysis of Introductory Psychology examinations at the University of Texas at San Antonio revealed that 94 per cent of the multiple-choice questions assess differences between highly-similar concepts. 1 Yet in spite of the widespread use of questions like these, very little is known about how to acquire the knowledge necessary to answer them. Therefore the goal of this theoretically-motivated study was to test the efficacy of a new strategy for learning highly-similar, yet often confused concepts. This strategy is called differential-associative processing.
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