Although a sizable body of knowledge is prerequisite to expert skill, that knowledge must be indexed by large numbers of patterns that, on recognition, guide the expert in a fraction of a second to relevant parts of the knowledge store. The knowledge forms complex schemata that can guide a problem's interpretation and solution and that constitute a large part of what we call physical intuition.

A new test for auditory perception, the Auditory Analysis Test, was given to 284 children in kindergarten through grade 6. The instrument, consisting of 40 items, asks the testee to repeat a spoken word, then to repeat it again without certain specified phonemic elements - such as a beginning, ending or medially-positioned consonant sound. Seven categories of item difficulty were proposed. Test results varied, both within and between class groups. Performance tended to improve with age and grade placement. Pearson Product-Moment Correlations of individual AAT scores with Stanford Achievement Test reading scores yielded significant relationships (p<.01) ranging from .53 (grade 1) to .84 (grade 3). Analysis of errors supported the validity of test item difficulty and provided direction for the design of a treatment approach to auditory perceptual dysfunction.

We describe a set of two computer‐implemented models that solve physics problems in ways characteristic of more and less competent human solvers. The main features accounting for different competences are differences in strategy for selecting physics principles, and differences in the degree of automation in the process of applying a single principle. The models provide a good account of the order in which principles are applied by human solvers working problems in kinematics and dynamics. They also are sufficiently flexible to allow easy extension to several related domains of physics problems.

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This paper analyzes a typical school spelling task in terms of an information processing model of spelling performance~ It explores the nature of the speller's internal representation of the word to be spelled, the information he must have in memory about the target word, and the organization of the processes available to use that information to produce a spelling and verify its accuracy. Sources of error in the execution of the task, with examples of errors from children's spelling tests, are discussed in terms of the model. Ways in which the model may be adapted to explain performance on other kinds of spelling tasks and some implications for instruction are suggested. A partially implemented computer simulation of the spelling process is described.