The present study evaluates the updating of long-term memory for duration. After learning a temporal discrimination associating one lever with a standard duration (4 sec) and another lever with both a shorter (1-sec) and a longer (16-sec) duration, rats underwent a single session for learning a new standard duration. The temporal generalization…

Research has shown that the types of tasks assigned to students affect their learning. Various authors have described desirable features of mathematical tasks or of the activity they initiate. Others have suggested task taxonomies that might be used in classifying mathematical tasks. Drawing on this literature, we propose a set of task types that…

The article outlines ways that teachers could use the content in Biomes and Food Security unit in the Australian curriculum, and its state and territory versions, to encourage their students to engage with higher order thinking. It first briefly discusses how to describe and classify higher-order thinking and argues that concepts are central to…

Practical collaboration at the intersection of education and neuroscience research is difficult because the combined discipline encompasses both the activity of microscopic neurons and the complex social interactions of teachers and students in a classroom. Taking a pragmatic view, this paper discusses three education objectives to which…

Computational Thinking is considered a universal competence, which should be added to every child's analytical ability as a vital ingredient of their school learning. In this article we further elaborate on what Computational Thinking is and present examples of what needs to be taught and how. First we position Computational Thinking in Papert's…

As transfer researchers have begun to investigate a broader range of phenomena, they have correspondingly put forward new processes to provide explanatory accounts for the occurrence of transfer. This move coincides with a call to acknowledge the contribution of social interactions, language, cultural artifacts, and normed practices to the…

The remarkable successes of the physical sciences have been built on highly general quantitative laws, which serve as the basis for understanding an enormous variety of specific physical systems. How far is it possible to construct universal principles in the cognitive sciences, in terms of which specific aspects of perception, memory, or decision…

Young children tend to generalize novel names for novel solid objects by similarity in shape, a phenomenon dubbed "the shape bias". We believe that the critical insights needed to explain the shape bias in particular, and cognitive development more generally, come from Dynamic Systems Theory. We present two examples of recent work focusing on the…

Discusses problems relating to situated cognition and cognitivist approaches to learning and instruction. Contends that authenticity and generalizability are compatible; introduces the notion of the authenticity-Generalizability (A-G) continuum, where the emphasis should be scaffolding within the continuum; and proposes two kinds of information…

This paper examines the question of whether there are useful general thinking skills. It offers a working definition of "thinking skill" and identifies ways in which this concept has been over-applied. Thinking skills, used across domains, are not inevitably weak as a result of the generality-power tradeoff. Admitting that thinking skills require…

The booklet describes the efforts planned by the Washington Research Organization (UWRO) to study ways in which generalization of skills may be facilitated by severely retarded individuals. It is explained that activities of UWRO are organized around four major tasks: descriptive and laboratory research; research in natural educational settings;…

This guest editorial describes ways teachers can use guessing games about an unknown item in a "mystery box" to help children improve their abilities to listen to others, recall information, ask purposeful questions, classify items by class, make inferences, synthesize information, and draw conclusions. The author presents information…

Three experiments were conducted that provide a direct examination of within-category discontinuity manipulations on the implicit, procedural-based learning and the explicit, hypothesis-testing systems proposed in F. G. Ashby, L. A. Alfonso-Reese, A. U. Turken, and E. M. Waldron's (1998) competition between verbal and implicit systems model.…

This study addressed the problem of promoting generalization of knowledge in people with mental handicaps, by presenting an approach based on the idea that certain cognitive representations of strategies and related concepts are common to solving a wide variety of problems. The surface context of these problems may vary considerably, but all will…

This paper presents the Hypothesis Testing Theory/Model and the Information Processing Model developed by M. Parrill-Bernstein in relation to the field of behavior disorders. The models provide a framework for (1) studying both problem solving skills and social behavior and (2) developing intervention programs for behavior disordered adolescents.…