This article presents an Exponential Growth Learning Trajectory (EGLT), a trajectory identifying and characterizing middle grade students' initial and developing understanding of exponential growth as a result of an instructional emphasis on covariation. The EGLT explicates students' thinking and learning over time in relation to a set of tasks…

Under the normative Expected Value (EV) model, multiple outcomes are additive, but in everyday worth judgement intuitive averaging prevails. Young children also use averaging in EV judgements, leading to a disordinal, crossover violation of utility when children average the part worths of simple gambles involving independent events (Schlottmann,…

Two experiments (N=136) studied how 4- to 6-month-olds perceive a simple schematic event, seen as goal-directed action and reaction from 3 years of age. In our causal reaction event, a red square moved toward a blue square, stopping prior to contact. Blue began to move away before red stopped, so that both briefly moved simultaneously at a…

In tool use, a transformation rule defines the relation between an operating movement and its distal effect. This rule is determined by the tool structure and requires no explicit definition. The present study investigates how humans represent and apply compatible and incompatible transformation rules in tool use. In Experiment 1, participants had…

Assessments, embedded with teachers' implicit (i.e. tacit) domain knowledge, play an important role in evaluating "comprehension of a subject". The knowledge on the importance of both the concepts and their relationships of a subject, if captured, made explicit, and shared around, may greatly help teachers construct more effective…

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) research suggests that the adult capacity is limited to three or four multifeature object representations. Despite evidence supporting a developmental increase in capacity, it remains unclear what the unit of capacity is in children. The current study employed the change detection paradigm to investigate both the…

The field of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) includes designers who emphasize effectiveness, measured via experiments, as well as designers who emphasize context and conduct qualitative research on teaching and learning practices. We conjectured that these two different emphases could be fruitful combined in a research and…

The present study used two letter detection tasks, the classic missing letter effect paradigm and a single word versus familiar word compound version of this paradigm, to study bottom-up and top-down processes involved in reading in normally achieving as compared to low achieving elementary school readers. The research participants were children…

The arguments about the dimensions of nature of science and the strategies for teaching it are still controversial. In this research, as part of these arguments, a context based on the issue of demarcation of science from pseudoscience was offered and questioned for its effectiveness in nature of science teaching. The research was planned for an…

To date, little work has been done investigating prospective memory in children, particularly using a delay-execute paradigm. Two experiments were conducted to investigate this issue with children aged 5-11 years. While playing a computer driving game, children's ability to carry out a delayed intention either immediately a target cue appeared or…

This study addressed the problem of why students with learning disabilities in mathematics too often fail to develop multiplicative and divisional concepts/operations. We conducted a constructivist teaching experiment with 12 students (nine 5th and three 4th graders). This report focuses on three students' conceptual progress, particularly on…

Including gesture in instruction facilitates learning. Why? One possibility is that gesture points out objects in the immediate context and thus helps ground the words learners hear in the world they see. Previous work on gesture's role in instruction has used gestures that either point to or trace paths on objects, thus providing support for this…

The time-based resource-sharing model (P. Barrouillet, S. Bernardin, & V. Camos, 2004) assumes that during complex working memory span tasks, attention is frequently and surreptitiously switched from processing to reactivate decaying memory traces before their complete loss. Three experiments involving children from 5 to 14 years of age…

Two experiments investigated children's implicit and explicit differentiation between beliefs about matters of fact and matters of opinion. In Experiment 1, 8- to 9-year-olds' (n = 88) explicit understanding of the subjectivity of opinions was found to be limited, but their conformity to others' judgments on a matter of opinion was considerably…

Two experiments attempted to resolve previous contradictory findings concerning developmental trends in false memories within the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm by using an improved methodology--constructing age-appropriate associative lists. The research also extended the DRM paradigm to preschoolers. Experiment 1 (N = 320) included…