Instructors are constantly baffled by the fact that two students who are sitting in the same class, who have access to the same materials, can come to understand a particular chemistry concept differently. Variation theory offers a theoretical framework from which to explore possible variations in experience and the resulting differences in…

Purpose: While the natural expectation is that students seek greater depth of learning as they develop intellectually during their studies, some research calls this into question and even suggests that student learning can become shallower from year to year. The present study aims to investigate the relative depth of students' learning at…

Eye tracking was used to investigate how younger and older (60 or more years) adults use syntactic and semantic information to disambiguate noun/verb (NV) homographs (e.g., "park"). In event-related potential (ERP) work using the same materials, Lee and Federmeier (2009, 2011) found that young adults elicited a sustained frontal…

This article examines responses of 13 preservice students to a mentoring program during their junior year. Throughout the first two terms of a five semester teacher education program, senior physical education specialists agreed to mentor them (in pairs or trios) relative to their development. This qualitative analysis included collection of…

This article presents a marital horizon theory of emerging adulthood that posits that young people's perceptions of marriage are central factors in determining subgroup differences in the length of emerging adulthood as well as the specific behaviors that occur during this period in the family life cycle. The model was tested with a sample of 813…

After forty-nine years of watching and working in higher education, Arthur Chickering has determined that three R's truly are fundamental to helping students learn. In stark contrast to the traditional set, Chickering's three R's challenge educators to recognize, respect, and respond to wide-ranging individual differences among diverse learners.…

It has been argued that battered women who kill their abusers represent a special class of defendants being unfairly treated in the legal system. As a result, commentators have argued for reforms to permit the judicial system to respond more fairly. Researchers have investigated the influences of these prescribed legal modifications and the…

This report reviews a theoretically inspired empirical investigation of individual differences in knowledge, abilities, and nonability traits as part of an ongoing effort to better understand adult intellectual development and to develop more accurate measures of adult intelligence. Twenty Knowledge Scales were constructed, drawing on…