MNEMONIC STRATEGIES AND PARENT RECALL OF PRINCIPLES OF EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT.
Contributors: New York University.
Published: 1988
Number of pages: 139
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.
Description: Effective teaching strategies are an essential component of community-based health promotion. The time limit on nurse-client interaction suggests the need for efficient strategies that promote client comfort and involvement as well as retention and recall. Such a strategy, a media mnemonic, was developed from the philosophy of humanistic learning and the cognitive framework of information processing. A media mnemonic is defined as a culturally-familiar, media promoted, organizational context and as a novel and relevant association for the information to be learned. The purpose of this study was to examine empirically the effectiveness of a fairy tale as a media mnemonic, a case study as a story grammar mnemonic, and a didactic presentation without specific mnemonics. Each strategy was used to teach parents principles of cognitive and psychosocial development about children three through five years of age.

The experimental design included an author-developed questionnaire to test parent recall. Content validity was determined by a jury of experts. A pilot was conducted to refine the discriminatory potential of the twenty-four questions. A Kuder-Richardson reliability coefficient of.66 was obtained for the test as administered for the study.

The sample consisted of 102 suburban, caucasian and married parents. The 81 mothers and 21 fathers represented a median age range of 30-39. All subjects had attended college with 22 having earned graduate degrees. Median annual family income ranged from 40-80 thousand.

Statistical analysis were conducted using several factorial designs appropriate to the variables tested. The SPSS/PC+ Anova and Manova programs were used. The fairy tale group scored significantly higher than either the story or the didactic group but the latter two groups were not significantly different from one another. The analogic relevance as well as the imagery and novelty of the fairy tale provide a possible explanation for the unexpected weakness of the story grammar mnemonic. The results of the study suggest the efficacy of a media mnemonic as an efficient teaching strategy for health promotion.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 49-08, Section: B, page: 3103.

Thesis (PH.D.)--NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, 1988.

School code: 0146.