A COMPARISON OF MEDIATIONAL TRAINING IN CHILDREN'S PAIRED-ASSOCIATE LEARNING

Abstract

It has been demonstrated that verbal and imaginal mediational procedures can facilitate learning. However, the relative contributions of these strategies to the paired-associate learning of children of varying ages has not yet been adequately investigated.;Fifty-four, male and female, second and fifth grade students participated in a within-subjects, paired-associate learning experiment. Performance was evaluated with recognition and recall measures of learning following one control and four experimental mediational training conditions.;PAL was significantly better under the mediational conditions as contrasted with the control condition and higher levels of learning were reached with recognition rather than recall testing. Under most conditions, verbal mediational training, where the children learned to associate picture-pairs with sentences, resulted in higher levels of performance than visual mediational training where students employed drawings as associative links between the pairs.;Older children showed greater learning efficiency across all conditions. Mediational training resulted in greater improvement over the control condition for the fifth grade student except when visual and verbal mediators were produced for the picture pairs. In these instances the younger students demonstrated greater improvement over the control condition.;It was generally concluded that mediational training results in superior performance over control (instructional) conditions and that verbal mediational training is the more effective strategy. It was also determined that the actual writing of sentences or drawing of pictures may be of more benefit to the younger student than the imagining of such associative mnemonics.