The Acquisition and Retention of Knowledge: A Cognitive View

the long version

This is a college-level textbook that provides a comprehensive and credible theory of how humans can learn and retain substantial and growing bodies of potentially meaningful, organized subject-matter knowledge on an extended, long-term basis. It identifies explicitly the cognitive conditions under which such learning and retention occurs, and indicates how they are influenced by relevant cognitive structure, frequency, mental `set' and motivational variables, and, most importantly, by the probable underlying functional cognitive processes involved.