| During the past few decades, attempts have been made to integrate cognitive and education theory in order to create more effective educational curricula. Across the educational curriculum, students have difficulty learning hierarchically structured information. The difficulty in learning this type information may have more to do with the underlying structure rather than the complexity of the content itself. Two artificial grammar learning experiments were used to test the relative difficulty of learning recursive structure, comprising various levels of embedding, from sequentially presented information containing parenthetical, spatial, or no cues. Task performance was measured across three experimental sessions: Learning, Generalization Test, and Fragment Completion Test. Overall, center-embedded sequences were more difficult for both college and middle school students to learn than right-branching sequences, especially as the amount of embedding increased. The presence of spatial and parenthetical cues resulted in large performance gains, especially for the right-branching sequences. Finally, middle school and college students performed in an astonishingly similar way across the three experimental sessions. The results suggest that a better understanding of why certain structures are more difficult to learn and the variables that enhance learning can provide insight for developing more effective educational curricula that facilitate learning across the curriculum. |
