The curse of dimensionality, which has been widely studied in statistics and machine learning, occurs when additional features cause the size of the feature space to grow so quickly that learning classification rules becomes increasingly difficult. How do people overcome the curse of dimensionality when acquiring real-world categories that have…

This paper uses evidence-centered assessment design (ECD) to structure and analyze a laboratory activity where students collect and represent titration curve data to determine acid strength in terms of molarity and dissociation constant. Following principles of multidimensional learning, the activity prompts students to demonstrate knowledge of…

Protocol-guided teaching is a student-centered instructional model in which the teacher creates the learning protocol prior to the lesson in order to direct students toward active and autonomous learning. A well-structured learning protocol is essential for the effective application of this instructional paradigm. This article evaluates the…

Protocol-guided teaching is a student-centered instruction paradigm in which teachers compose learning protocols in advance to guide students through the entire learning process in an effort to foster in them the capacity for autonomous learning. Effective learning protocols can have a substantial impact on classroom outcomes. The purpose of this…

Marton and Säljö ("Br J Educ Psychol" 46:4-11, 1976a) described deep-level and surface-level processing in experiments in which students read and recalled academic texts. They did not discuss whether levels of processing had any counterparts in students' everyday studies. However, their article is often credited as the source of the…

In this paper we review the contribution of our original work titled "Simulating Instructional Roles Through Pedagogical Agents" published in the "International Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Education" (Baylor and Kim in "Computers and Human Behavior," 25(2), 450-457, 2005). Our original work operationalized…

The neuronal systems that promote protective defensive behaviours have been studied extensively using Pavlovian conditioning. In this paradigm, an initially neutral-conditioned stimulus is paired with an aversive unconditioned stimulus leading the subjects to display behavioural signs of fear. Decades of research into the neural bases of this…

Suppose one observes a correlation between two events, B and C, and infers that B causes C. Later one discovers that event A explains away the correlation between B and C. Normatively, one should now dismiss or weaken the belief that B causes C. Nonetheless, participants in the current study who observed a positive contingency between B and C…

Bayesian orthodoxy posits a tight relationship between conditional probability and updating. Namely, the probability of an event "A" after learning "B" should equal the conditional probability of "A" given "B" prior to learning "B". We examine whether ordinary judgment conforms to the orthodox view. In three experiments we found substantial…

The present review explores the meaning of the term 'incidental' in light of how incidental learning is framed, conceptualized, and operationalized in second language (L2) vocabulary research. Three interpretations of incidental vocabulary learning that seem to appear recurrently in the literature are presented and discussed along with examples of…

Adults can rapidly learn artificial phonotactic constraints such as /"f"/ "occurs only at the beginning of syllables" by producing syllables that contain those constraints. This implicit learning is then reflected in their speech errors. However, second-order constraints in which the placement of a phoneme depends on another…

Fictional materials are commonly used in the classroom to teach course content. Both laboratory experiments and classroom demonstrations illustrate the benefits of using fiction to help students learn accurate information about the world. However, fictional sources often contain factually inaccurate content, making them a potent vehicle for…

When students encounter a set of concepts (or terms or principles) that are similar in some way, they often confuse one with another. For instance, they might mistake one word for another word with a similar spelling (e.g., allusion instead of illusion) or choose the wrong strategy for a mathematics problem because it resembles a different kind of…

The term "organisational learning" was popularised by Peter Senge in "The Fifth Discipline", his seminal book from 1990. Since then, the term has become widely accepted among those interested in organisational learning and change management. However, partly due to the somewhat ambiguous situation which arises in a university…

Four experiments explored the role of contexts in information retrieval after different levels of acquisition training in human predictive learning. Participants were trained where cue (X) was followed by an outcome in context A while a different cue (Y) was followed by the absence of the outcome in context B. When 4 training trials with each cue…