The keyword method, originally developed as an instructional technique in foreign language acquisition, was tested for its application in other school learning tasks and as a self-initiated study strategy. Two classes containing a total of 40 eighth grade students served as the experimental and control groups. The tasks were learning to pair technical terms with their definitions and learning to pair proper surnames with facts, events, and accomplishments. After five training sessions the experimental group students were able to carry out the sequence of operations constituting the keyword method, including the generation of concrete keywords and of compound images that bridge keywords and response terms. The experimental group performed significantly better than the control group, exceeding the control group by 40% on the posttest and 36% on the other posttest. Subsequent unprompted tests showed substantially higher performance by students trained in the keyword method than by those students from the control group. (Author/RL)