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The hypothesis was tested that highly anxious students invited to employ reflective learning strategies would spontaneously use a more reflective, less impulsive approach in solving response-oriented problems. A total of 53 fourth-grade students were administered the Child Anxiety Scale: 12 students were assigned to a high-anxiety treatment group, while 16 served as low-anxiety controls. Anxiety was used as an indicator of the independent variable of impulsivity. The dependent variable, involving both response behavior and learning behavior measures, was determined on a pretest/treatment/posttest basis. Treatment basically consisted of (1) obtaining a baseline measure of the number of stimulus items subjects could recognize, extract from a random array, and order to match a previously seen set; (2) suggesting to subjects a labeling procedure that might improve performance; and (3) continuing the first procedure from baseline until progress could no longer be made. Importantly, no explicit strategy was outlined; subjects chose their own labeling strategy as well as the degree to which they utilized strategy. A measure of learning was taken during treatment administration. Main findings indicated that the higher order strategy adopted by both control and treatment groups resulted in more reflective behavior in learning tasks and also transferred to subjects' response behavior. (RH)

A series of three experiments was conducted for the purposes of (1) clarifying problems of previous research on the relationship between working memory capacity and performance on figural analogy tasks, and (2) exploring developmental issues concerning executive strategies, working memory capacity, and perceptual processing. Directly manipulating the amount of available memory capacity a subject has while solving figural analogy problems, the first experiment required 29 fifth-grade children in Ontario, Canada to solve nondegenerate and semidegenerate figural analogy problems while counting backwards aloud by ones from 10 to 0. The second experiment investigated the possibility that children with a low level of working memory capacity who are unable to solve a high-level problem may lack necessary task-specific perceptual skills or cognitive operations. A random sample of 44 children selected from junior-kindergarten, kindergarten, and first-grade classes were presented with a series of nondegenerate figural analogy problems, broken down into prerequisite tasks. The third experiment tested the possibility that failure of subjects to solve such problems was due to lack of understanding of the nature of the conjunctive response concept underlying the bidimensional comparison strategy. A total of 24 first-grade children were administered pretest, treatment, and posttest sets of pictures of people and/or geometric figural analogy problems. Subjects were read names of features required for a correct conjunctive response. Treatment also consisted of a verbal facilitation procedure. Results indicate that young children have difficulty applying analogical reasoning to figural problems because of insufficient working memory capacity after carrying out the encoding elements of the task and because of perceptual encoding errors. (RH)

Thirty grade 4 subjects were individually tested on a digit span test of working memory capacity (Case and Kurland) and the Reading Span Test (Daneman and Carpenter). The Reading Span Test was administered using sentences at a grade 2, grade 4, and grade 6 reading level. It was predicted that, as the decoding demands of the stimulus sentences in the Reading Span Test were increased, the amount of working memory capacity available for other reading tasks such as comprehension would decrease relative to a subject's working memory span as measured on the digit span test. This hypothesis was confirmed , providing support for the predictions of the LaBerge and Samuels model of learning to read. The results further support the Case, Kurland and Goldberg argument that working memory capacity is a function of the interaction between the amount of central capacity required for processing operations and the amount of working memory capacity left over for storage. However, these conclusions need to be qualified by the observation that sentence reading time and word meaning knowledge were not controlled in this study. (Author/PN)