Response Latency as a Function of Training Method, Information Level, Acquisition, and Overlearning.

Abstract

Response latency was studied as a measure of associative strength or degree of learning and as a possible basis for instructional decision making in computer-assisted instruction. Latency was investigated in a paired-associate task as a function of training procedure (a comparison of the anticipation and recall paradigms) and information transmission requirements (a comparison of two, four, and eight response alternatives to an eight-item stimulus list) during both acquisition and overlearning. The magnitude and variability of latency measurements were independent of training method during acquisition, but both were reduced by the recall paradigm during overlearning. Latency was an increasing function of the number of response alternatives during both acquisition and overlearning. During acquisition, prior to the trial of last error (TLE) for each item, latency remained relatively constant and did not differ between correct and incorrect responses. There was a substantial drop in latency following the TLE. Pre-TLE latencies were independent of S learning rate, while post-TLE latencies were an increasing function of learning rate. The latency of the first correct response to an item was found to be shorter if there were no subsequent errors on that item. In general, the study suggests that latency, at least in a rote verbal task, may be a sensitive measure of strength of learning during the overlearning phase, but not during initial learning.The development of instructional strat-With the availability of computer-based egies is currently an area of considerable instructional systems, the educator now interest to educators and psychologists, has the potential ability to construct instructional sequences which will adapt 1 The research reported herein was performed to the particular requirements of individual pursuant to Contract Nonr-624(l8) between the students. Such a sequence would vary the Personnel and Training Branch, Psychological Sci-POn t Pn i. flT ,H nrHor nf tho instructional ma ences Division, Office of Naval Research and the Content and order Ol the instructional ma-Learning Research and Development Center, Uni-temls Presented to the student as a funcversity of Pittsburgh. Additional support was tion of the student's responses. The major provided under Contract OE-4-10-158 with the problem facing the psychologist interested u of Education, United States Department of in thig area j,, that the nature of the fun(J . S^^i^f^LT^r^to "I*** the student's responses to structive criticism offered by William W. Cooley, optimal presentation schemes is not well Paul M. Kjeldergaard, J. Trevor Peirce, and James known. The computer engineer has pro-F -Jo* 38 -. . , ,,, , vided the educator with the ability to "Request for reprints should be sent to: Robert ","!,« pvtrpmplv fast rplntivolv snnViioti Glaaer, Learning Research and Development Cen-mJ T? extremely last, relatively SOpnistlter, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsyl-cated decisions concerning individual stuvania 15213.dents, and the psychologist ...

Response to fluency-oriented intervention of Dutch poor readers

“…It is well established that repeated practice of words leads to faster word recognition based on word-specific knowledge (e.g. Judd & Glaser, 1969;Lemoine, Levy, & Hutchinson, 1993;Samuels, 1997), but not to transfer to unpractised words, even when they share sublexical units (Thaler, Ebner, Wimmer & Landerl, 2004). Van den Bosch, van Bon and Schreuder (1995) demonstrated that (some) generalization could be achieved when the phonological recoding process was continuously stimulated by presenting new pseudowords time and again.…”

Effect of Paced and Unpaced Practice on Skill Application and Retention: How Much Is Enough?

“…In this respect, fluency could nevertheless be useful, both as a measure of the degree of learning that occurs beyond a 100% accuracy level and as a criterion to decide when practice should be stopped. Judd and Glaser (1969) made a similar proposal in their studies of the effect of overlearning on response latency. They argued that response latency could serve as an accurate measure of learning progress and could thus be used for instructional decision making, especially in situations where response accuracy was high.…”

“…However, because (a) fluency training always involves practicing beyond initial mastery, and (b) repeated practice is accompanied by a decrease in response latency ( Judd & Glaser, 1969;Newell & Rosebloom, 1981), it becomes difficult to ascertain whether the observed benefits of fluency training are caused by the achieved fluency level or simply by the amount of additional practice needed to establish it. This situation has led Dougherty and Johnson (1996) to suggest that fluency might not be distinguishable from overlearning or automaticity.…”

“…Our study provides evidence only that the specific pacing instruction that we used produced no academic benefit other than more positive attitudes. Thus the initial question remains unanswered: Assuming that response fluency is a good measure of association strength (Judd & Glaser, 1969;Peterson, 1965), is there an experimental manipulation that would, for an equal amount of practice, reduce this response latency? The fact that some researchers have been able to obtain higher response rates with an equal or even lesser amount of practice (Berquam, 1981;Ormrod & Spivey, 1990) suggests that such manipulations may exist.…”

Tests of an all-or-none model of verbal mediated responding.

“…It may be that it is the increase in information transmission with three alternatives over two alternatives that reduces the probability of giving the same alternative consistently. In paired-associate learning an increase in information transmission increases the latency of responding (Judd & Glaser, 1969). It is possible that in this task an increase in the time necessary to process the material is responsible for the decrease in c. Confirmation of this hypothesis must await experimentation in which the latencies are obtained.…”