ASSESSING STUDENTS APPLICATION AND TRANSFER OF A MNEMONIC STRATEGY - THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE

High school students participated in two experiments designed to inves tigate application and transfer of a mnemonic strategy. On Day 1 of Ex periment 1, mnemonically instructed students outperformed nonmnemonic control students on both recall and application tests for the initial task of learning passage-embedded information about features of fictit ious cities. No evidence of successful strategy transfer was obtained, however, on Day 2 passages about several U.S. presidents. In Experime nt 2, mnemonically instructed students again recalled and applied more Day 1 city information than did control students. Moreover, with Day 2 transfer passages that were less complex and more similar to the Day 1 cities passages, there was qualified support for the hypothesis tha t mnemonic students could transfer their previously learned strategy t o a set of new materials: Successful transfer was observed when the st udents were given an explicit hint to by to use a strategy similar to the one they had used previously (prompted transfer), but not when no such hint was provided (spontaneous transfer). (C) 1996 Academic Press , Inc.