Children actively and selectively transmit information to others based on the type of information and the context during learning. Four- to 7-year-old children preferentially transmit generalizable information in teaching-like contexts. Although 2-year-old children are able to distinguish between generalizable and non-generalizable information, it…

Previous work has shown that infants as young as 8 months of age can use certain features of the environment, such as the shape or color of visual stimuli, as cues to organize simple inputs into hierarchical rule structures, a robust form of reinforcement learning that supports generalization of prior learning to new contexts. However, especially…

Further research is needed on strategies to improve employment outcomes for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We replicated and extended prior research by examining the acquisition, maintenance, and generalization of discrete-trial training (DTT) performance of adults with ASD who were interested in careers as behavior technicians.…

While interest in active avoidance has recently been resurgent, many concerns relating to the nature of this form of learning remain unresolved. By separating stimulus and response acquisition, aversive Pavlovian-instrumental transfer can be used to measure the effect of avoidance learning on threat processing with more control than typical…

Slow reading has long been viewed as a teaching technique that engages students more deeply with course readings. Little systematic research, however, has been done to understand how this pedagogical strategy works in college classrooms. This study investigated how slow reading techniques promoted deep learning among undergraduate college students…

A broad consensus exists that the use of appropriate methods are important in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. However, methodological controversies arise around what constitutes acceptable evidence, if one needs a control group, how generalizable results must be, and other similar issues. Much SoTL work, I argue, asks questions about how…

Novel causal systems pose a problem of variable choice: How can a reasoner decide which variable is causally relevant? Which variable in the system should a learner manipulate to try to produce a desired, yet unfamiliar, casual outcome? In much causal reasoning research, participants learn how a particular set of preselected variables produce a…

Most speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in Malaysia practice with an undergraduate degree, which provides them with limited knowledge about and training in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). This limited knowledge and training may affect their confidence and competence when introducing and using AAC with individuals for whom it is…

Three experiments investigate how self-generated explanation influences children's causal learning. Five-year-olds (N = 114) observed data consistent with two hypotheses and were prompted to explain or to report each observation. In Study 1, when making novel generalizations, explainers were more likely to favor the hypothesis that accounted for…

Young children often endorse explanations of the natural world that appeal to functions or purpose--for example, that rocks are pointy so animals can scratch on them. By contrast, most Western-educated adults reject such explanations. What accounts for this change? We investigated 4- to 5-year-old children's ability to generalize the form of an…

This study examines statistical learning as a mechanism for Chinese orthographic learning among children in Grades 3-5. Using an artificial orthography, children were repeatedly exposed to positional, phonetic, and semantic regularities of radicals. Children showed statistical learning of all three regularities. Regularities' levels of consistency…

It is important to question the generalizability of the knowledge about the nature of science (NOS), and thus know whether the knowledge about NOS can be transferred to various contexts. As such, the purpose of this study was to investigate whether students were able to transfer their acquired NOS understandings into contexts that vary in their…

Words refer to objects in the world, but this correspondence is not one-to-one: Each word has a range of referents that share features on some dimensions but differ on others. This property of language is called underspecification. Parts of the lexicon have characteristic patterns of underspecification; for example, artifact nouns tend to specify…

In this commentary, Mary James highlights two problems she deemed critical during her work exploring the relationships between assessment and learning in theory and practice. First, efforts to improve assessment for learning were not always successful either in improving performance or in other ways. Second, and this may be a reason for the first…

Generalization has been a major focus of curriculum standards and research efforts in mathematics education. While researchers have documented many productive contexts for generalizing and the generalizations students make, less attention has been given to the processes of generalizing. Moreover, there has been less work done with high school…