An important part of learning processes in the professional development of counselors is the integration of declarative knowledge and professional experience. It was investigated in-how-far mental health counselors at different levels of expertise (experts, intermediates, novices) differ in their availability of experience-based knowledge…

The current study aims to explore how children explain the concepts of biology and how biological knowledge develops across ages by focusing on the structure and functions of the digestive system. The study was conducted with 60 children. The data were collected through the interviews conducted within a think-aloud protocol. The interview data…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their relatives process faces differently from typically developed (TD) individuals. In an fMRI face-viewing task, TD and undiagnosed sibling (SIB) children (5-18 years) showed face specialization in the right amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, with left fusiform and right amygdala face…

This study investigated the mental representations of student and professional engineers while they solved an engineering design problem. The intent was to gain a deeper insight into the differences that exist in the cognitive processes of engineering students and professional engineers as they use mental representations (i.e., propositions,…

In some higher education courses that focus on case studies, teachers can provide situated scenarios (such as business bottlenecks and medical cases) and problem-solving discussion tasks for students to promote their cognitive skills. There is limited research on the content, performance, and behavioral patterns of teaching using online…

The purpose of this study was to investigate novices learning to use a mission planning system. Novice participants received one training session, followed by three test sessions. This was compared to expert performance. During the test sessions, all participants were required to "think aloud", based on Ericsson and Simon's (Ericsson, K.A. and…

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…

In this study we explore the strategies that undergraduate and graduate chemistry students use when engaged in classification tasks involving symbolic and microscopic (particulate) representations of different chemical reactions. We were specifically interested in characterizing the basic features to which students pay attention when classifying…

Context: Evolution from novice to expert is associated with the development of expert-type knowledge structure. The objectives of this study were to examine reliability and validity of concept sorting (ConSort[C]) as a measure of static knowledge structure and to determine the relationship between concepts in static knowledge structure and…

What is the connection between student success and their approaches to learning? Do learning approaches develop with university experience? We explored these questions by constructing profiles using a specially developed fixed response instrument and administering this to students at two similar South African universities. Groups consisted of…

Identifies cognitive strategies used during the categorization of qualitative data and investigates how various factors may be related to the testimonial validity of the categories. Essay writers ranked sets of categories in terms of overall quality and rated them while thinking aloud. Think-aloud protocols for the "best" and…

Developmental psychologists have been interested in the cognitive ability of perspective-taking for a number of years due to the apparent link between perspective-taking deficits and Autistic Spectrum Disorder. Most of the research in this area has employed the concepts and techniques of the approach commonly referred to as "Theory of Mind." The…

Discussion of differences between problem-solving techniques of novices and experts suggests that both the experts' mental model and common novice problems can be derived from analyses of several expert and novice protocols. Three instructional strategies based on these differences are discussed, including the use of a computer simulation to solve…

Examines the problem-solving strategies of experts and novices. Summarizes the overall performance of four experts and eight novices. Examines several protocols in depth in order to show how subjects introduced new terms and relationships during problem solving sessions. Compares the strategies of expert and novice problem solvers. (CW)