Logical learning and retention: a general review of experiments with meaningful verbal materials.

Learning From Verbal Discourse in Educational Media: A Review of the Literature

“…Such sets could arise from various sources--a history of' success in rate learning, a strategy adopted because of the attitude that rate learning is beneficial, and so forth. Welborn and English (1937) point out that success in meaningful learning is much more related to intelligence (thus, to general verbal ability) than success in rate learning. It is possible that learning for ideas is a strategy much more likely to be adopted by students of above-average verbal ability, while a strategy of learning for rate recall is one more often adopted by students of lower verbal ability.…”

“…Psychologists have long been aware of the difference between meaningful and rote learning (Welborn and English, 1937); their preference for working with th~latter has been dictated, for the most part, by the fact that verbatim recalls are much easier to score and quantify.…”

“…Early experiments on the learning of connected discourse were performed by Henderson (1903) and Lyon (1917). The first full review of research literature in this area appears to have been the one by Welborn and English (1937), who were concerned mainly with the differences between what they called "verbatim" and "logical" learning. (Roughly, "verbatim" learning is learning of a discourse, i. e., its exact words, while "logical" learning is learning from a discourse, i.e., its content~d ideas.) Stroud (1940) touched on certain problems of MVD learnir.g in his review of research in school learning.…”

Recall of Verbal Materials After a Four-Year Interval

“…Relatively few studies have been concerned with the retention of verbal materials over extended time intervals, and this · has been especially true with respect to the recall method of measuring retention ( 3,4,5,6). The present note reports a few data which · are relevant to this question .…”

Processes in Reading Comprehension and the Teaching of Comprehension

“…Yenesky reported that few studies of comprehension were done. In this period there were isolated instances of research relevant to comprehension, such as Bartlett's work on memory for stories (1932), additional work on errors in comprehension that built on Thorndike's study (Touton & Berry, 1931) and work on learning from prose (reviewed by Welborn and English, 1937), but there was no sustained attack on reading comprehension. An analysis of the content of educational psychology texts during this period supports Yenesky's position.…”