Abstract
Informative feedback procedures were compared with active training in concept attainment. 60 first-, second-, and third-grade children were presented with conjunctive concepts and assigned at random to each of 12 groups. The stimuli were drawings on cards representing the concepts. A 4 × 3 factorial design was employed which involved 3 combinations of feedback plus active training and 3 levels of task complexity. The results showed the informative feedback groups (right-wrong, nothing-wrong and right-nothing) discovered the concepts faster than the active training groups. Over all 3 levels of task difficulty the right-wrong condition yielded significantly better performance than the other feedback conditions and, in addition, nothing-wrong resulted in a faster rate of learning than right-nothing.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.