Long-term transfer of a mediational strategy by moderately retarded children

Moderately retarded children were instructed to produce prepositional mediatros by physically manipulating PA objects in learning three nine-term PA lists. Mediational training, distributed across days or weeks, consisted of one or three different prepositions supplied for two-thirds or for all of the items. It was found that mediation subjects performed significantly better than control subjects on an unaided test list administered 2 weeks after training, regardless of distribution of training, degree of aid or number of prepositions provided during training sessions. The degress of transfer, which was larger than in previously reported studies, was attributed to the instructional procedures requiring active production of prepositional mediators, coupled with an emphasis on their value. It was suggested that individual variability in mediational transfer should be considered in future research on mediational transfer.