The theme of this essay is that there are only three core instructional paradigms and that within the framework of these paradigms, only five types of knowledge can be acquired. The instructional paradigms (behavior, development, and apprenticeship) are defined by how novices are distinguished from experts and by the nature of the mechanism of transformation (from novice to expert). The knowledge typology is derived from contemporary cognitive science and from the precognitive experimental paradigms of learning. The types of knowledge are: declarative (verbal learning), procedural (skill learning), conceptual (concept attainment), analogical (one-trial learning), and logical (problem solving.) A number of examples are provided, including the contents of a journal issue. This classification system clarifies the theoretical history of research projects, reveals commonalities that underlie different terminologies, helps resolve controversies, and provides guidelines for educational research that will advance the field.Anyone who tries to review a corpus of literature for this journal must grapple with an extraordinarily difficult problem: identifying exactly what a set of studies has in common. Common terminology is not enough. One person's motivation may be another's cognitive strategy. Methodological differences often crucially differentiate studies that go by the same names (e.g., mastery learning). Figuring out what the studies really have in common means delving well below terminology to underlying assumptions. Once identified, such assumptions should constitute categories that can be strongly defended on theoretical grounds. They could even be true.People who write textbooks, as compared to people who undertake such limited projects as writing review articles, face categorization problems that are practically insurmountable. That's why textbook authors so often clump and list research findings in ways that are essentially arbitrary. And that's why their hapless students (and I speak as an instructor of hundreds of the hapless) have no alternative but to try to memorize arbitrary lists of research findings and hope for the best on examinations.The first textbook I wrote, Cognitive Processes in Education, was published in 1972. The revision was published in 1992. Normally, a revision is accomplished in 3 years. It took me 20 years because the field of educational psychology was changing so rapidly. I produced three completely revised drafts in manuscript before the fourth draft finally went to press. This rapid change forced me to try to figure out, once and for all, how the instructional literature could be classified logically.

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One hundred and thirty-six 8-year-old children participated in two studies of their ability to spell familiar or nonsense words which they had seen or heard for 2-5 sec. A visual or auditory task was interpolated for 12-15 sec before spelling began. Spelling of meaningful words was most accurate when words were presented visually. except when the interpolated task was watching random letters of the alphabet. Nonsense spelling did not show a similar pattern. The theoretical implication of this difference is that, under certain conditions. visual word presentation provides more efficient pointers to long-term memory information than auditory presentation does. A model of the facilitation process is offered.Traditional short-term memory research derives from relatively simple models. A set of stimuli are introduced into a buffer of some kind and after an interval are emitted. Research has been concerned with the nature of the material, the nature of the buffer, interval variations, additional demands upon the butler or upon the processor generally, and response conditions (Norman. 1970). It has been assumed that such activity could be distinguished from long-term memory, considered to require more time for both input and output of stimulus materials, and to be organized in ways that are relatively immune to the interval variations or attention stressors affecting short-term memory function.Most real-world tasks, however, require an interplay between the two systems. Spelling is an example. Spelling requires subjects to maintain some portion of a stimulus word in short-term memory, while retrieving and applying information-such as word sounds and orthographic rules-from long-term . memory. Clearly, a model to account for such behavior must be concerned with the active integration and control of information stored in several ways, and resulting from different histories of presentation and rehearsal. Presented here is a set of experimental explorations into the nature of such a model. We studied children because we wanted to investigate the early stages of memory consolidation and activation.

Self-evaluation and expectancy scales were administered to 96 psychotic males, and protocols were later divided into suicidal (N = 43) and nonsuicidal (N = S3) groups, on the basis of record information. Self-evaluation (SE) was relatively low for covertly suicidal Ss, but not for Ss who had made actual suicide attempts. Suicidal Ss did not have a shorter subjective life expectancy (SLE) than nonsuicidals, but SLE was directly associated with SE regardless of suicidal tendencies. Constricted, "work-only" future plans were associated with SE and SLE among suicidals only, suggesting that the content of the subjective future may mediate the relationship between SE and SLE in suicidal patients.