For geotechnical design in practice, soils are, in general, assumed to behave as a linear elastic or perfect plastic material. More realistic geotechnical design, however, should take into account various factors that affect soil behavior in the field, such as non-linearity of stress-strain response, stress history, and water content. In this study, a series of laboratory tests including triaxial and resonant column tests were peformed with sands of various silt contents, relative densities, stress states, OCR and water contents. This aims at investigating effects of various factors that affect strength and stiffness of sands. From the results in this study, it is found that the effect of OCR is significant for the intermediate stress-strain range from the initial to failure, while it may be ignored for the initial stiffness and peak strength. For the effect of water content, it is observed that the initial elastic modulus decreases with increasing water content at lower confining stress and relative density At higher confining stresses, the effect of water content Is found to become small.