Concept rule, preliminary instruction, and presentation paradigm, three factors affecting concept attainment, were considered in an attribute identification study with 80 college undergraduates as Ss. A 4 × 2 × 2 factorial design was employed in which the variables were (a) concept rule (conjunction, disjunction, conditional, or biconditional), (b) pretraining (provided or not provided), (c) presentation paradigm (reception or selection). Reception was clearly superior to selection, while pretraining in truth-table strategy was effective in reducing the difficulty of the conceptual rules. Pretraining also affected the order of difficulty of the rules.
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