Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy ETDs

Publication Date

7-27-1976

Abstract

Problem

The purpose of this study was four-fold: (1) to extend the adult based procedure employed in the study of levels of processing in memory to the developmentally young; (2) to determine whether the levels of processing effect manifests itself in children as young as those in first grade; (3) to study the development of the dynamic memory system unencumbered by developmentally influenced strategies in the areas of metamemory, encoding, organization and storage, and retrieval; and (4) to study the developmental nature of encoding time as a further check in the validation of the adult levels of processing procedure.

Procedures and Methods

Ninety-six subjects, 32 each from first, third, and eighth grades, were tested individually for their encoding speeds and recognition memory performance in an incidental learning situation. The incidental learning task required that the subjects listen to a question asked by the experimenter, read the word that followed on a screen and respond either "yes" or "no" depending upon the fit of the observed word to the question. The questions were designed to access different levels of processing by involving the subjects differentially with the stimulus words. The first level question required that the subjects make a decision about the physical features of the word (whether it was printed all in the same sized letters or not), the second required a rhyming match decision, the third required a category decision and the forth required a sentence fit decision. After 40 such trial sequences the subjects were given a list of 120 words composed of the 40 target and 80 distractor words and were instructed to circle the 40 words that had appeared on the screen. Encoding times in milliseconds were measured by recording the latency between word onset and subject response by question level, original response and grade. Recognition performance was measured by the number of deletion errors an individual subject made in the recognition phase. Deletion errors were recorded by original encoding response, by level and by grade. The experimental sessions were conducted during regularly scheduled class times between 9:00 and 3:00. Total anonymity was ensured for all participants and participation was voluntary.

Results

Statistical procedures, including multivariate analysis of variance, univariate analyses of variance and Pearson Product-moment correlation coefficients, yielded several significant findings. While there was no significant difference in recognition performance by grade, significant differences did occur between those words that were processed more deeply (levels 3 and 4) as opposed to those at more peripheral levels (1 and 2) with the words processed at a deeper level being recognized better. Those words which subjects responded to "yes" were recognized better than the words to which they responded “no.” Encoding time differences were significant by grade (eighth was fastest while first was slowest), by level (level 4 taking the longest and level 1 the shortest time) and by original response (“no” taking longer than “yes”).

Conclusions

It was concluded that the dynamic memory system is developmentally invariant, commensurate with the tasks in this study, and that this memory system is sensitive to and can be accessed adequately within the levels of processing adult memory framework. It was subsequently concluded that with children, as with adults, it is the activity at encoding that determines depth of processing and subsequent retention. It was also concluded that the encoding times were different at the different levels of processing, but the differences in encoding times across grades may be an artifact of differential reading speeds.

Document Type

Dissertation

Language

English

Degree Name

Educational Leadership

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy

First Committee Member (Chair)

Peggy Janice Blackwell

Second Committee Member

Peder Jack Johnson

Third Committee Member

Mary Bierman Harris

Fourth Committee Member

Wayne Paul Moellenberg

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