Originally published in 1973, this book was published in two volumes. In the first volume, the author describes what he sees as the rudiments of three deterministic partial theories of structural learning. The first involves competence, partial theories which deal only with the problem of how to account for the various kinds of behavior of which people are typically capable. Special attention is given to mathematical competence. Nothing is said about learning or performance. The second partial theory is concerned with motivation, learning, and performance under idealized conditions, and is obtained from the first partial theory by imposing further structure on it. This theory says nothing about memory of the limited capacity of human subjects to process information. ... The final theory is obtained from the second by making additional assumptions, which bring memory and finite information processing into the picture. The theory is still partial, however, since no attempt is made to deal with certain ultra-short-term behavioral phenomena which appear to depend directly on particular physiological characteristics.

Originally published in 1976, this title is an edited volume and reflects the major approaches being taken in structural learning at the time. Chapter 1 deals with the basic question of whether competence (knowledge) should be characterized in terms of rules (automata), on the one hand, or associations on the other. The bulk of Chapter 2 is devoted to a series of earlier experiments on rule learning by the editor and his associates. The two contributions in Chapter 3 deal with graph theoretical models. Piagetian models constitute the subject of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 deals with attempts to stimulate human behaviour with a computer. Chapter 6 ranges over a wide variety of competence models, with particular reference to logic and mathematics. In Chapter 7 the editor proposes a new theory of structural learning, together with some empirical results.