Automated image analysis has received increasing attention in social scientific research, yet existing scholarship has mostly covered the application of supervised learning to classify images into predefined categories. This study focuses on the task of unsupervised image clustering, which aims to automatically discover categories from unlabelled…

Studies on engagement and learning design in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have laid the groundwork for understanding how people learn in this relatively new type of informal learning environment. To advance our understanding of how people learn in MOOCs, we investigate the intersection between learning design and the temporal process of…

The open nature of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) attracts a large number of learners with different backgrounds, skills, motivations, and goals. This has brought a need to understand such heterogeneity in populations of MOOC learners. Categorizing these learners based upon their interaction with the course can help address this need and…

Social anxiety in learning is prevalent amongst traditional-age students and has a marked effect on their engagement with higher education. It receives little attention from academic or support services and there is a presumption that students will manage their anxieties. Yet it is unclear what psychosocial resources they might bring to this task…

It is well known that the regulation of processes is an important factor in problem solving from Grade 7 to university level (cf. Mevarech & Kramarski, 1997; Schoenfeld, 1985). We do not, however, know much about the problem-solving competencies of younger children (cf. Heinze, 2007, p. 15). Do the results of studies also hold true for…

Background: A re-analysis of several university-level interview studies has suggested that some students show evidence of a deep and stable approach to learning, along with other characteristics that support the approach. This combination, it was argued, could be seen to indicate a "disposition to understand for oneself." Aim: To…

The teaching and learning of mathematics cannot be understood without considering the resolution of word problems. These kinds of problems not only connect mathematical concepts with language (and therefore with reality) but also promote the learning related to other scientific areas. In primary school, problems are solved by using basic…

New high-frequency, automated data collection and analysis algorithms could offer new insights into complex learning processes, especially for tasks in which students have opportunities to generate unique open-ended artifacts such as computer programs. These approaches should be particularly useful because the need for scalable project-based and…

A. Redish et al. (2007) proposed a reinforcement learning model of context-dependent learning and extinction in conditioning experiments, using the idea of "state classification" to categorize new observations into states. In the current article, the authors propose an interpretation of this idea in terms of normative statistical inference. They…

Young adults' rehearsal was serially and categorically organized. Older adults' rehearsal was nonstrategic. Results show that direct strategy measures provide more information about processes underlying age differences in memory than do outcome measures alone. (Author)

A 12-item stimulus list composed of three conceptual categories, each with two low- and two high- associated word pairs, was presented for free Ss recall to 20 educable mentally retarded (EMR) preadolescents, 20 EMR adolescents, and 20 nonretarded fourth-grade children who showed associative clustering in accordance with preexperimental interitem…

Mildly retarded children were instructed in encoding strategies or rehearsal strategy. Performance was higher for semantic encoding strategies. Seven months later the semantic condition also showed greater improvement after strategies were prompted. Performance on incidental learning tasks was enhanced for 13- but not 10-year olds. (Author/RD)