Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to J E Ormrod.
Two studies examined the speed with which good spellers and poor spellers spell easy and difficult words. At both the elementary school (Grades 3 and 4) and undergraduate levels, good spellers spelled words more quickly than poor spellers. This difference appeared even for very easy words that all subjects could spell. Implications for the importance of automaticity in spelling competence are discussed.
The role of visual memory in learning to spell words was investigated through a matching task on which one nonsense word was presented, then a second word identical in spelling or differing in one letter was presented. Ten pairs of 9th and 10th-grade students, matched for intelligence and sex but of different spelling ability, were asked to indicate whether word pairs were spelled the same or differently. The two words of a pair were either the same or different in print size or letter case. Significant effects were obtained for spelling ability, print size (same or different), and letter case (same or different), and the interaction of size X case, providing evidence for the use of visual memory by both good and poor spellers in learning to spell words. Good spellers were equally able to identify matched and mismatched pairs, while poor spellers showed greater difficulty in identifying mismatches than matches, supporting Frith's (1980) "partial cues" explanation of poor spelling performance.
Concerns are raised regarding the samples used in studies of learning disabled children. In this study, subjects were 56 high school students; 10 exhibited perceptual or processing difficulties ("learning disabled"), 15 performed poorly on reading achievement tests ("low readers"), and 31 showed no scholastic problems ("nondisabled"). Scores of the three groups were compared on nine memory tasks involving either auditory or visual input and encompassing a wide variety of content (digits, pictures, related and unrelated words, paired-associates, or sentences). The nondisabled group performed significantly better than the learning disabled group on all but one of the tasks. The low readers' performance was similar to that of the learning disabled group for some tasks, but significantly different on other tasks, most notably on tasks involving visual factors. Implications for research with learning disabled populations are discussed.
This study investigated the nature of strategies used in solving the three-term series problem. Three presentation modes (auditory, visual/sequential, and visual/simultaneous) were crossed with two question positions (before-premises and after-premises), for a total of six methods of problem presentation. Both high-spatial/imagal and low-spatial/imagal problems were employed, the assumption being that better performance on high-spatial/imagal problems reflected the use of a spatial/imagal strategy, while equal performance on both types of problems indicated the use of an alternative, perhaps verbal, strategy. It was hypothesized that different presentations would lead to differences in memory demands, input/processing interference, and mathemagenic behaviors, and thus to different problem-solving strategies. Response data and subjective reports confirmed this prediction. Results were discussed in terms of the Clark-Huttenlocher controversy (H. H. Clark, Linguistic processes in deductive reasoning, in Psychological Review, 1969, 76, 387--404; J. Huttenlocher, Constructing spatial images: A strategy in reasoning, Psychological Review, 1968, 75, 550--560).