Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A common method of teaching vocabulary involves presenting students with new words in context and having the students derive the meaning of these words based on contextual cues. Beck, McKeown and McCaslin (1983) have argued that the contexts used to teach new words should be highly constraining. Although highly constraining contexts avoid ambiguity they do not present the learner with the necessity of combining contextual and word specific information and thus practicing skills needed for general comprehension. W e suggest that a superior method of teaching is to relax the amount of contextual constraint because to optimize the learning from the presentation of a sentence the student must use both top down and bottom up processes to discover the meaning of the sentence, thus integrating two sources of knowledge about the word. The present research compares knowledge and use of newly learned words between students who learned the new words using three encounters with highly constraining contexts, three encounters with moderately constraining contexts or three progressively less constraining contexts. Students were given definitional and comprehension tests both immediately after study and at a one week delay. The results suggest that repeated encounters with moderately constraining contexts are superior to repeated encounters with highly constraining contexts.