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1984 13: 5EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHERRICHARD C. ANDERSON

Some Reflections on the Acquisition of Knowledge  

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Some Reflections on the Acquisition of Knowledge

RICHARD C. ANDERSON Center for the Study of Reading

University of Illinois

People who hold views similar to mine about the nature of knowledge and its acquisition place great stock in how communications are organ­ized. Thus, I am especially con­cerned on this important occasion that my talk have a clear and pre­dictable organization. I first thought that my ideas would fit a Problem/Solution frame, but that wasn't quite right. Then I tried Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis. That didn't work either. Finally, I had the insight that a Presidential Ad­dress is part of a ceremony mark­ing a rite of passage. Accordingly, a traditional organizing principle seemed appropriate. I hope you agree, because I will now tell you that the true deep structure of my remarks is Something Old/Some­thing New/Something Borrowed.

A Schema Theory of Knowledge In the first section of my talk, I

will present a sketch of a schema theory of knowledge and summarize some evidence that illustrates its power. There are many versions of schema theory. What I am present­ing is a blend of my own thinking and the thinking of others.

A schema is an abstract structure of information. It is abstract in the

This paper was a Presidential Ad­dress at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research As­sociation, New Orleans, Louisiana, April 1984.

Richard C. Anderson is Professor and Director at the University of Il­linois, Center for the Study of Reading, 51 Gerty Drive, Champaign, Illinois 61820. His area of specializa­tion is the psychology of reading.

sense that it summarizes informa­tion about many particular cases. A schema is structured in the sense that it represents the relationships among components. The term sche­ma is an apt one for characterizing knowledge, because the essence of knowledge is structure. Knowledge is not a "basket of facts."

A schema can be conceived as consisting of a set of expectations. Comprehension occurs when these expectations are fulfilled by the specific information that a scene, message, or happening delivers to the senses. Information that neat­ly satisfies expectations can be en­coded into memory so as to "instan­tiate" the "slots" in the schema. In­formation that does not fit expecta­tions may not be encoded, or it may be distorted so that the fit is better. Gaps in available information may be completed by inference in order to maintain consistency with expec­tations. Later, the same expecta­tions that guided the encoding of in­formation can be brought into play to guide retrieval and reconstruc­tion (see Anderson & Pearson, 1984).

Without a schema to which an event can be assimilated, learning is slow and uncertain. This fact is illustrated in the now classic ex­periments of Bransford and John­son (1972) that showed that learn­ing was nil from vaguely worded passages about such matters as washing clothes, unless a title that suggested the appropriate schema was provided.

Of course, occasions on which a person will be without a schema with which to assimilate an event are rare. Closer to life is the con­trast between a well-articulated and

a less well-articulated schema. Rand Spiro, Mark Anderson, and I com­pleted a study (1976) that illustrates this contrast. We wrote two stories, one about dining at a fancy restau­rant, the other a closely comparable story about shopping at a super­market. The stories mentioned the same eighteen items of food and drink, in the same order, attributed to the same characters. The sub­jects read one of the two stories and then attempted to recall it.

The first prediction was that the food and drink items would be bet­ter recalled by subjects who had read the restaurant story. This prediction follows from the fact that a dining-at-a-fancy-restaurant-schema contains more structure than a supermarket schema. For in­stance, foods are expected that are suitable as appetizers, entrees and desserts. The items that can fit in­to these categories are constrained. For instance, hot dogs will not be the entree nor Koolaid the beverage. Furthermore, there are cross-category constraints. For instance, white wine is likely to be consumed during the meal if the entree is fish or poultry. On the other hand, just about any food or beverage fits a supermarket schema. The predic­tion that subjects who read the restaurant story would recall more items of food and drink was con­firmed in two experiments.

The second prediction was that subjects would more accurately ascribe foods to characters when given the restaurant story. The reasoning was that it is important to get the specific food one orders in a restaurant, whereas in a super­market it does not matter who puts the broccoli into the shopping cart.

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In each of the two experiments, this prediction was confirmed. The con­ditional probability of attributing a food or drink item to the correct character, given that the item had been recalled, was higher among subjects who received the restau­rant story than among subjects who had received the supermarket story.

The third prediction was that order of recall of food and beverage items would correspond more close­ly to the order in which the items were mentioned in the stories when subjects had received the restau­rant story. The basis for this hypo­thesis is that there is no particular sequence for selecting items in a su­permarket, whereas in a fine res­taurant it would be odd to have the chocolate mousse before the vichy-ssoise. This prediction was partial­ly confirmed. The mean correlation between recall order and order of mention was significantly higher for subjects who read the restaurant story in the first experiment, and there was a trend in the same direc­tion in the second experiment.

Many other studies show substan­tial differences in comprehension, learning, and memory when the reader is able to bring to bear a more developed schema instead of a less developed one. Especially in­teresting is an experiment by Spilich, Vesonder, Chiesi, and Voss (1979). They asked subjects high and low in knowledge of baseball, but equivalent in verbal ability, to read and recall a story about a half inning from a fictitious baseball game. Knowledge of baseball had both quantitative and qualitative effects.

High-knowledge subjects recalled more information than low-knowl­edge subjects, particularly informa­tion of tactical significance to the game. Reproduced below is a syn­thesized recall protocol consisting of the propositions recalled by 50% or more of the subjects in the high-knowledge group:

The Ridgeville Robins were playing the Center City Cougars. The score was 5-3. The Robins were ahead. It was the last half of the fifth inning. The sky was dark and the rain was getting heavier. The first batter came up to bat. The pitcher in the field was left-handed. The pitcher's

E.R.A. was 6.00. The batter hit the ball into center field, but it was caught and the batter was out. The next batter came up. This batter led the league in home runs. The batter hit the ball to left field and arrived safely at second with a double. The next batter came up, hit a ground ball toward the shortstop, and arrived safely at first base. The run­ner on second stayed on base. The runner from second advanced to third base and the runner on first went to second. The next batter came up and got a hit. The runner on third scored and the runner on second was out at the plate. The um­pires called the game because of rain.

The synthesized recall protocol of the low-knowledge subjects given below is shorter. Notice that what has been left out is information that relates characteristics of players, actions, and events to the tactical goals of the game. On the other hand, the protocol includes one piece of incidental information, the name of the first batter, that is not present even in the high-knowledge protocol.

The Ridgeville Robins were playing the Center City Cougars. The score was 5-3. The sky was dark and the rain was becoming heavier. The first batter, Jones, came to bat. The pitch­er was ready to pitch. Jones flew out. The next batter came up, hit the ball, and made it safely to second base. The next batter came up and made it safely to first base. A runner was out at home plate. The umpires call­ed the game because of rain.

The restaurant versus supermar­ket and baseball experiments in­volved contrived texts read under special circumstances. This is char­acteristic of many of the studies that have been done under the aegis of schema theory. That the theory is, nonetheless, potentially general-izable is suggested by the success of a computer program called FRUMP (Fast Reading, Understanding, and Memory Program) developed by DeJong (1982) that skims and sum­marizes news articles. FRUMP uses a type of schema that DeJong calls a "sketchy script" to organize its knowledge of the world. The cur­rent version of the program con­tains sketchy scripts for 60 dif­ferent topics ranging from earth­quakes to economic or military aid given by one country to another to labor strikes. FRUMP is able to

write a summary of news articles on any of these topics. For example, consider the following article:

BY FERNANDO DEL MUNDO MANILA, PHILIPPINES (UPI)-A bomb exploded aboard a Philippine Airlines jetliner at 24,000 feet Fri­day but the only fatality was the bomber, who was sucked out a six-foot wide hole blasted in the wall of the plane's toilet.

The twin-engine British-built BAC-111 jet landed safely in Manila despite loss of pressurization. Three persons aboard the plane suffered minor injuries.

Officials said Rodolfo Salazar, an electrician from Cebu, 350 miles south of Manila, went into the toilet before the blast and was not among the 78 passengers and six crew members accounted for later.

"All circumstances point to the fact that he carried the bomb," an of­ficial said.

Intelligence agents said the explo­sive may have been a sister banaag. The passengers were held for about four hours for questioning and released.

The summary of this article that FRUMP produced was, "A bomb explosion in a Philippines Airlines jet has killed the person who planted the bomb and injured three people." In order to demonstrate that the program develops a concep­tual representation, rather than relying on tricks with surface fea­tures of language, FRUMP produces summaries in French, Spanish, and Chinese as well as English.

FRUMP is noteworthy because it is able to analyze news articles never seen before by the program or the programmer. In a test of the system, it was run with 120 unselected, unedited United Press International stories. An evaluation indicated that FRUMP produced a satisfactory summary of 37% of the stories and a nearly satisfactory summary of an additional 18%. Many of the failures could be traced to the lack of vocabulary and certain low level inference rules. When these we're added and the system tested again with the same 120 stories, it produced 54% satisfac­tory and 24% nearly satisfactory summaries. It should be stressed that FRUMP produces very stereo­typed summaries. Its summaries of stories on any one topic all contain the same categories of information.

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Thus far, I have tried to make the case that schema theory affords a promising approach to the analysis of knowledge. In many circles, this conclusion is already taken for granted, and the issues are detailed ones of structure and process. It is to a selected few of these issues that I now turn.

Problems with Current Realiza­tions of Schema Theory

The major problem that I will ad­dress is whether schema theory can give an adequate account of the large amount of detail that people get into their mental representa­tions during most acts of compre­hension. In a 1977 paper I stated unequivocally that the answer is yes. I wrote then that, "Abstract schemata program people to gen­erate concrete scenarios" (p. 423). I must have thought these words were profound because I repeated them exactly when I was summing up. Insofar as I can reconstruct what I meant, I was endorsing what I will in a few moments call the strong form of schema theory.

Consider the following phrases (from Anderson & Ortony, 1975):

eat steak eat soup eat an apple

Notice that information that is in no sense part of the dictionary defini­tions of the words in these phrases springs readily to mind, for in­stance, information about the uten­sils that would be used in eating. Eating a steak requires a knife and fork. Soup is sipped with a spoon. Ordinarily an apple is eaten without a utensil. Notice also that when one ponders the phrases one easily determines that these cases of eating involve different actions of the lips, teeth, and tongue. Other details are immediately available when one considers different possi­ble agents. Contrast,

The executive ate the steak. The baby ate the steak. The dog ate the steak.

Both the act of eating and the steak are different in these cases. The ex­ecutive is relishing a charcoal broiled strip sirloin. • The baby's steak has been pulverized into a gruel and his mother is feeding it to him from a teaspoon. The dog is

gnawing on scraps, or his steak is raw, pilfered from the table beside the grill.

There is evidence that particular­ized, or "instantiated," representa­tions are the rule rather than the exception in language comprehen­sion, even in circumstances that would not seem to demand details beyond those that are explicitly given (Anderson & McGaw, 1973). Often a particularized representa­tion is integral to comprehension. In the sentence, The boy earned a merit badge, the reader has not un­derstood the sentence unless he or she sees that the boy is a Scout (Anderson, Pichert, Goetz, Schal-lert, Stevens, & Trollip, 1976). Thus, any complete theory of com­prehension must explain the rich particularity of all ordinary in­stances of comprehension. Where is this detail to come from?

A first point is that traditional theories of language comprehension fail miserably to provide an answer. Basically, a traditional theory says that the meaning of a sentence con­sists of the core meanings of the in­dividual words concatenated ac­cording to rules of grammar. Re­turning to my principal example, the core meaning of "to eat" is something like: to put food in one's mouth, chew, and swallow. There is nothing here about which utensils to use to get the food to the mouth. The obvious conclusion is that form­ing a rich representation requires the application of rich knowledge.

I will outline two positions on the nature of this rich knowledge. I will deliberately draw these positions in extreme form so that the difference between them can be appreciated. The first position is a strong version of schema theory. It presumes that people operate on the basis of general principles abstracted from experience. With respect to eating, the position is that over the course of a lifetime people construct a general theory or "mental model" (Gentner & Stevens, 1983) of eating. Selecting the right utensil to eat a given food is one of the issues handled within the theory of eating.

As an intellectual exercise, con­sider some of the major elements in such a theory of eating. It will have to have the overall form of a theory of goal-directed actions. In par­

ticular, it will have to embody the knowledge that a major subgoal in eating is delivering bite-sized quan­tities of food to the mouth. It will have to embody the knowledge that the first step in achieving this subgoal is separating a small mass of food from a large mass. It will have to embody the knowledge that this can be accomplished by cutting, sawing, stabbing, grasping, scoop­ing, or shoveling. The theory will need to incorporate the knowledge that relates these functions to the physical structure of available uten­sils. Based on this knowledge and principles about the physical prop­erties of foods, the theory will have to enable the selection of appro­priate utensils. A person using the theory should be able to deduce, for instance, that juicy foods ought to be scooped with a spoon while foods with a loose, particulate structure are to be separated and shoveled with a fork.

The theory, or eating schema, will have to embody knowledge of the important social goals that eating may serve. Manner of eating may reveal that one has social preten­sions or lacks pretensions, that one is a conformist or a rebel, that one is tense or at ease. Probably the maxim that most of us follow most of the time is, "Be couth when eating, but no more couth than necessary."

Implementing this maxim re­quires the schema to contain prin­ciples for evaluating social situa­tions. Thus, the schema ought to provide for a different interpreta­tion of the sentence, The woman ate the chicken wing, depending upon the context. If she's at a picnic or in a college-town bar, the woman can eat with her fingers. Any barbecue sauce she gets on her fingers she can wipe off on her blue jeans. On the other hand, if she's at a formal dinner, she had better eat with her knife and fork; if she gets gravy on her fingers, she will wipe it off on her napkin.

The important property of the strong version of schema theory is that actions and interpretations of others' actions are deduced from first principles. That is to say, for instance, no matter how many times you have eaten a steak, seen others eat a steak, or heard about

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the eating of a steak, on each occa­sion you solve anew the problem of which utensils to use. Previous ex­perience affects the schema, but the schema alone determines how you behave.

Another noteworthy feature of the strong version of the theory is that it makes possible well-moti­vated explanations. Producing an explanation for why soup is eaten with a spoon is simply a matter of putting a frequently made deduc­tion into words.

Now for the bad news. Although the strong theory of the eating schema is elegant, it won't work very well, precisely because it is too elegant. It is plain that there is on­ly a loose connection between the physical properties of foods and the utensils that are customarily used to eat them in this society. Ice cream could be eaten with a fork, but in fact it is done with a spoon. Wine or ice water could be sipped with a spoon, but instead the glass is raised to the mouth with one's fingers. On formal occasions, using utensils is favored over using one's fingers, but even on these occasions seal-lions and carrot strips are not eaten with a knife and fork.

A weaker theory of the schema for eating accommodates these ar­bitrary realities. Assume a table of correspondences: On one side, foods are listed, and on the other side the utensils used to eat them. A theory with this form will work, but notice that it does not enable deep explan­ations of behavior. When asked why one eats mashed potatoes and gravy with a fork, a person operating sole­ly on the basis of this schema would only be able to say, "That's just how you do it." To be sure, this person might know that eating soup with a fork is impossible, not merely un­couth, but this would be an ancillary inference.

The epitome of the strong version of a schema is a scientific theory. A schema of this sort includes general principles that relate form and func­tion, motive and action, and cause and effect. Strong schemas assume idealized worlds of perfect vaccums and frictionless surfaces. Weak schemas bring some order to messy worlds in which the sense and ref­erence of terms is indefinite, cate­gories are fuzzy, and the relation­

ships among entities may be arbi­trary.

The concept of a weak schema en­ables a simple but compelling ex­planation for the fact that people develop rich representations during language comprehension: Words and phrases are treated as instruc­tions to locate specific cases in memory. These are just the cases at the intersection signified by the words. For instance, the phrase eating an apple is a direction to remember cases involving the eat­ing of apples. The sense and refer­ence of the terms are then refined, instantiated, and elaborated on the basis of these cases. The implication of this simple hypothesis is that much that passes for general knowl­edge is actually produced as needed by retrieving specific cases and making calculations based on them.

Evidence in support of this theory was obtained in an experiment by Henry Halff, Andrew Ortony, and myself (1976). Subjects compared the degree of redness of red objects mentioned in a series of 20 sentenc­es. Here are several of the sentences:

The boy with the red hair stood out in the crowd.

The knife blade was red with the blood of the victim.

His skin was red due to sunburn.

The red fire engine raced down the street.

Subjects were asked, for example, if the red of a sunburn was definite­ly redder than, definitely less red than, or possibly equally red as the red of a fire engine. It was assumed that a subject would choose the first alternative if all of the cases he re­membered or generated of sunburn red were redder than any of the cases of fire engine red. He would choose the second alternative if all of his fire engine reds were redder than any sunburn reds. Whereas if some sunburn reds were as red as some fire engine reds, he would in­dicate this by selecting the third alternative.

A formal, mathematical model gave a good account of the data from the study. The model requires the assumption, first, that the vari­ous red objects are represented as having different degrees of redness.

Second, the degree of redness of an object cannot be represented as a point, or precise shade of red. Rather, it has to be represented as an interval, or range of redness. Third, the width of the interval varies, depending on the object.

The foregoing results fit nicely with the hypothesis that people treat the words that comprise phrases as instructions to locate specific cases in memory. But the results would be difficult to accom­modate within a theory that says that the meaning of a phrase is a product of the fixed, general mean­ings of the constituent words. Put more broadly, the results are con­sistent with the weak version of schema, inconsistent with the strong version.

In summary, if one has a strong schema, comprehension is principle-driven and predictions can be thought of as being derived. With a weak schema, comprehension is precedent-driven. Predictions are not so much derived as looked up; generalizations are local in scope and treated with caution. My hypothesis is that the notion of a weak schema gives the best account of the thinking of ordinary people in ordinary circumstances dealing with ordinary matters of knowl­edge.

An Implication for the Acquisition of Knowledge

The knowledge a person already possesses is the principal deter­miner of what a person can come to know. Knowledge, in turn, is condi­tioned by culture. Therefore, a per­son's culture is a principal deter­miner of what he or she can come to know.

It is easy to demonstrate that the foregoing proposition is true. The classic demonstration was Sir Fred­eric Bartlett's (1932) study of the attempts of educated Englishmen to recall the North American Indian tale, The War of the Ghosts. More recently, Margaret Steffensen, Chitra Joag-dev, and I (1979) asked natives of India and the United States to read and recall letters about an Indian wedding and an American wedding. As expected on the basis of schema theory, subjects read what for them was the native

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text more quickly than they read the foreign text; they recalled more propositions from the native text, particularly propositions rated as important by fellow natives, than they did from the foreign text; and they introduced more culturally ap­propriate elaborations of the native text but more culturally inappro­priate distortions of the foreign text.

The foregoing illustrates specific effects of culture. There may also be nonspecific effects. I am not the first to propose that culture in­fluences metaknowledge, or beliefs and knowledge about knowledge, in certain predictable ways.

In the preceding section I devel­oped the thesis that a weak form of schema theory gives the best ac­count of the knowledge that most people have about ordinary matters. Weak schemas include generaliza­tions that are limited in scope, en­tail low standards for internal con­sistency, and provide an uncertain basis for a priori reasoning. It follows that these characteristics ought to have been acknowledged by folk philosophers who have tried to articulate knowledge about or­dinary knowledge.

To test this hypothesis, I searched all the entries referenced in the in­dexes of three large books of prov­erbs (Champion, 1938; Smith, 1948; Taylor & Whiting, 1958) under words of knowing such as truth, experience, knowledge, learn, and wisdom. Eighty-one proverbs were located that expressed an attitude about the nature of knowledge. Of these, 58 were judged to endorse a sentiment consistent with the weak schema position, whereas only three ex­pressed a sentiment consistent with the strong schema position and 20 were indeterminate. The proverbs

"here illustrate the predominant view:

There is an exception to every rule.

That which proves too much proves nothing.

You cannot know wine by the barrel.

He who knows the most believes the least.

The proof of pudding is in the eating.

One should not judge the ship before it has experienced the sea.

Knowledge and timber shouldn't be used until they are seasoned.

There is striking evidence that unschooled members of traditional societies are, by the standards of developed societies, extraordinari­ly guarded about entertaining generalizations or engaging in a priori reasoning. Scribner (1977) presented members of the Kpelle tribe in West Africa with syllo­gisms, including,

All Kpelle men are rice farmers. Mr. Smith is not a rice farmer. Is he a Kpelle man?

The following protocol was ob­tained from a nonliterate Kpelle farmer in response to this syllogism:

S: I don't know this man in per­son. I have not laid eyes on the man himself. E: Just think about the state­ment. S: If I know him in person, I can answer that question, but since I do not know him in person I can­not answer that question. E: Try and answer from your Kpelle sense. S: If you know a person, if a question comes up about him you are able to answer. But if you do not know this person, if a ques­tion comes up about him, it's hard for you to answer it.

This man rejected even the possibility of coming to a conclusion on the basis of propositions about which he has no personal informa­tion. At the same time, Scribner points out, the protocol illustrates that the man's failure to accept this reasoning task should not be con­fused with a failure to adopt a hypothetical attitude. Scribner says, "One might say he was reasoning hypothetically about the actual while denying the possibili­ty of reasoning hypothetically about the postulated."

High forms of knowing are the province of learned fields of study—and perhaps to a lesser ex­tent of commerce and industry—to which the Kpelle tribesman had not been exposed. There is evidence

that when people from traditional societies go to school or engage in trade they begin to approach syllogisms in the same fashion as people from developed societies (Cole & Scribner, 1974).

Children's early, out-of-school ex­perience is with mundane matters of physical and social reality. Ac­cordingly, to accommodate this ex­perience, they could be expected to acquire weak, low-inference sche­mas. Moreover, children not only acquire experience, they acquire in­terpretations of experience. In the first instance, these interpretations are mediated by parents and other caretakers. It stands to reason that the beliefs about knowledge that a child develops will be influenced by those of his parents.

Parents' beliefs about knowledge will be conditioned by educational and occupational status. There is a tradition of research that attempts to explain ethnic and social class dif­ferences in terms of "restricted" and "elaborated" linguistic codes (Bernstein, 1964; Hess & Shipman, 1965). This research was based on the assumption, which I do not ac­cept, that there are inherent dif­ferences in cognitive capacity. Fur­thermore, from the perspective I am trying to develop here, the level of analysis was not sufficiently deep. The issue goes beyond discourse style. It is a question of assumptions about knowledge. Pre­sumably parents vary in the extent to which they model reasoned ex­planations and justifications and the extent to which they expect them from their children. At one extreme is the parent, who when the child asks, "Why?" always responds, "Because I told you so."

Later, teachers become mediators of experience. There is not research, of which I am aware, on teacher-conveyed beliefs about knowledge. There is, however, research that bears indirectly on the issue. Durkin (1978-79) observed nearly 18,000 minutes in elemen­tary school classrooms during reading and social studies periods. She judged that less than 1% of this time was devoted to "comprehen­sion instruction," which she defined as the teacher doing or saying something that would help a child figure out the meaning of a unit of

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language larger than a word. Although apparently few elemen­

tary school children are getting much instruction on larger mean­ings, there is evidence that the in­struction given to children eval­uated as low in ability is particular­ly restricted in this respect. Accord­ing to a recent review (Hiebert, 1983), when compared to children in high-ability groups, children in low-ability reading groups receive more word-list drill but read less con­nected text; they are asked more simple, factual questions and fewer questions that require inference or synthesis; they spend more time reading aloud and less time reading silently; and when they do read aloud, they have a higher percent­age of their pronunciation errors corrected by the teacher.

Nothing about this school regi­men would be expected to disturb "weak" views of knowledge; in­deed, it is likely to reinforce them. It is known that poor students are unlikely to make the inferences re­quired to weave the information in a text into a coherent overall men­tal model (see Bradsford, Stein, Vye, Franks, Auble, Mezynski, & Perfetto, 1982, and accompanying papers). My conjecture is that one reason this is so is that poor students' beliefs about knowledge do not lead them to suppose that consistent interpretations of events are generally possible, or even desirable. For the poor student, knowledge is a basket of facts.

References

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Anderson, R.C, & McGaw, B. (1973). On the representation of the mean­ings of general terms. Journal of Ex­perimental Psychology, 101, 301-306.

Anderson, R.C, & Ortony, A. (1975). On putting apples into bottles—A problem of polysemy. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 167-180.

Anderson, R.C, & Pearson, P.D. (1984). A schema-theoretic view of basic pro­cesses in reading comprehension. In P.D. Pearson, R. Barr, M.L. Kamil, & P. Mosenthal (Eds.), Handbook of

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Anderson, R.C, Pichert, J.W., Goetz, E.T., Schallert, D.L., Stevens, K.V., & Trollip, S.R. (1976). Instantiation of general terms. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 15, 667-679.

Anderson, R.C, Spiro, R.J., & Ander­son, M.C. (1978). Schemata as scaf­folding for the representation of in­formation in connected discourse. American Educational Research Journal, 15, 433-440.

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Bernstein, B. (1964). Aspects of lan­guage and learning in the genesis of the social process. In D. Hymes (Ed.) Language in culture and society. New York: Harper & Row.

Bransford, J.D., & Johnson, M.K. (1972). Contextual prerequisites for understanding: Some investigations of comprehension and recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 717-726.

Bransford, J.D., Stein, B.S., Vye, N.J., Franks, J.J., Auble, P.M., Mezynski, K.T., & Perfetto G.A. (1982). Dif­ferences in approaches to learning: An,overview. Journal of Experimen­tal Psychology: General, S, (4), 390-398.

Champion, S.G. (1938). Racial proverbs: A selection of the world's proverbs ar­ranged linguistically. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd.

Cole, M., & Scribner, S. (1974). Culture and thought. New York: Wiley.

DeJong, G. (1982). An overview of the FRUMP system. In W.G. Lehnert & M.H. Ringle, (Eds.), Strategies for natural language processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Durkin, D. (1978-79). What classroom observations reveal about reading comprehension instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 14, 481-533.

Gentner, D., & Stevens, A.L. (1983). (Eds.) Mental models. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Halff, H.M., Ortony, A., & Anderson, R.C. (1976). A context-sensitive rep­resentation of word meaning. Memo­ry and Cognition, 4, 378-383.

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