Although a growing number of studies indicate that simple strategies, intuitions, or cognitive shortcuts called heuristics can persistently interfere with scientific reasoning in physics and chemistry, the persistence of heuristics related to learning biology is less known. In this study, we investigate the persistence of the "moving things…

When do children acquire a meta-representational Theory of Mind? False Belief (FB) tasks have become the litmus test to answer this question. In such tasks, subjects must ascribe a non-veridical belief to another agent and predict/explain her actions accordingly. Empirically, children pass explicit verbal versions of FB tasks from around age 4.…

Little is known about how children generate options for taking action in familiar situations or how they select which action option to actually perform. In this article, we explore the interplay between option generation and selection from a developmental perspective using sports as a testbed. In a longitudinal design with four measurement waves,…

The framework of "plateaus, dips, and leaps" shines light on periods when individuals may be inventing new methods of skilled performance. We begin with a review of the role "performance plateaus" have played in (a) experimental psychology, (b) human-computer interaction, and (c) cognitive science. We then reanalyze two classic…

This article presents a study aimed at examining the novice student answers in an introductory programming final e-exam to identify misconceptions and types of errors. Our study used the Delphi concept inventory to identify student misconceptions and skill, rule, and knowledge-based errors approach to identify the types of errors made by novices…

In the behavioral sciences, a popular approach to describe and predict behavior is cognitive modeling with adjustable parameters (i.e., which can be fitted to data). Modeling with adjustable parameters allows, among other things, measuring differences between people. At the same time, parameter estimation also bears the risk of overfitting. Are…

In this study the authors investigated whether children demonstrated the "underconfidence-with-practice" (UWP) effect. This effect is a highly robust metacognitive illusion in which adults become underconfident in their memory performance when asked to predict their memory for the same items across multiple study-test trials. One…

Dual-process theories have been proposed to explain normative and heuristic responses to reasoning and decision-making problems. Standard unitary and dual-process theories predict that normative responses should increase with age. However, research has focused recently on exceptions to this standard pattern, including developmental increases in…

A key element in science education is establishing and maintaining linkages between teachers and researchers that can eventuate in enhanced student outcomes. Determining when and where a new educational program or intervention results in an enhanced outcome can be sensitive to many different forces that the researcher must carefully manage. The…

A previous study with adults [Koriat, A. (2008a). "Easy comes, easy goes? The link between learning and remembering and its exploitation in metacognition." "Memory & Cognition," 36, 416-428] established a correlation between learning and remembering: items requiring more trials to acquisition (TTA) were less likely to be recalled than those…

The modern history of biology shows how Darwin's selectionist theory has replaced instructionist theories in explaining the operations of living things: first with inheritance through the gene pool of the 1850s, and second with the replacement of a template theory of immune system function in the 1960s. Today scholars in several disciplines…

In a study of the use of baserates and the representativeness heuristic, children and college students made judgments about scenarios that varied by domain and information provided. The use of baserates and heuristic, and the consistency between subjects' choices and rationales, increased with age. Use of individuating information developed early.…

This paper briefly reviews research on tasks in knowledge-rich domains including developmental studies, work in artificial intelligence, studies of expert/novice problem solving, and information processing analysis of aptitude test tasks that have provided increased understanding of the nature of expertise. Particularly evident is the finding that…

Two studies examined children's understanding of the origins, behaviors, and properties of objects. Children (1) were sensitive to the distinction between natural things and artifacts; (2) identified specific kinds of natural cause; and (3) understood the link between internal parts and self-generated activity. (BC)

Documents the patterns of coherence and persistence in energy conceptions. Describes the derivation of the Interview Vee technique and the procedure for putting an interview on the Vee. Discusses the production of Vee maps to help understand childrens' learning of concepts. (CW)