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Abstract

Ninety-six gifted and nongifted students were assigned at random to a free-study or one of three mnemonic conditions. The three mnemonic conditions presented mnemonic pictures for learning hardness levels of North American minerals in the first task, and prompted additional use of the strategy for the second task under three levels of structure. After the second recall task, students were questioned regarding their strategy use, and, finally, were given a retest of the originally learned material. It was found that both ability groups learned more in mnemonic conditions, although the difference was statistically significant for the gifted students only. It was also found that gifted students demonstrated a superior ability to employ this strategy independently in an additional learning task. In all conditions, for both ability groups, reported strategy use was found to be strongly related to performance.

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Acquisition and Transfer of Learning Strategies by Gifted and Nongifted Students

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