Elaboration instruction and verbalization as factors facilitating retarded children's recall.

Abstract

The effects of two types of elaboration training on the pairedassociate learning of educable retarded children were compared over two levels of verbalization, none and overt. 32 subjects were randomly assigned to one of four elaboration treatment conditions. The individual testing procedures were such that each subject was first tested on a warm-up list, then trained to generate elaborations, and finally given two trials to learn a list of 18 noun-pairs. The results supported the major hypothesis that overt verbalization would facilitate recall under both types of elaboration training, but no support was found for the secondary hypothesis that verbalization would result in relatively greater facilitation with one type of elaboration, imagery, than with the other type, sentence elaboration. Several possible explanations of the general effectiveness of overtly verbalized elaborations were examined. In addition, educational applications of elaboration were discussed, with special attention given to the implications of the verbalization finding. Elaboration Training and Verbalization as Factors Facilitating Retarded Children's Recall It has consistently been demonstrated that normal learners, both children and adults, recall more paired-associates when the words to be remembered are learned in a meaningful elaborative context (Reese, 1970; Rohwer, 1970, 1971). However, the elaboration effect is not as clear with educable mentally retarded (EMR) children. EMR children can utilize elaborative contexts when they are provided by the experimenter (Milgram, 1968; Turnure, 1971), but the ability of these learners to generate their own elaborative contexts when instructed to do so has been questioned (Jensen & Rohwer, 1963; MacMillan, 1970). MacMillan found instructions to generate elaborative contexts in the form of sentences of limited effectiveness with EMR children, whereas several studies (Milgram, 1967, 1968; Taylor, Josberger, & Knowlton, 1972) have found that such elaboration instructions facilitated the learning of retarded children. A recent trend in elaboration research with normal children is to identify the conditions under which the elaboration effect is limited (cf. Levin, Horvitz, & Kaplan, 1971). For example, Lev2.n et al. have noted that the magnitude of the elaboration effect is related to several procedural variables: the kind of mediational strategy incorporated, the method of testing adr.Tted, the type of learning materials employed (verbal versus pictures), and the mode