The prevalence of unfounded beliefs (e.g., supernatural or conspiracy beliefs) remains an important issue due to their negative consequences in various domains. Interventions were shown to reduce supernatural beliefs only when addressing pseudoscientific ones. Based on these findings, we designed a single session intervention aiming to teach…

Color charts, or grids of evenly spaced multicolored dots or squares, appear in the work of modern artists and designers. Often the artist/designer distributes the many colors in a way that could be described as "random," that is, without an obvious pattern. We conduct a statistical analysis of 125 "random-looking" art and design color charts and…

Evidence is presented for the immediate apprehension of exact small quantities. Participants performed a quantification task (are the number of items greater or smaller than?), and carry-over effects were examined between numbers requiring the same response. Carry-over effects between small numbers were strongly affected by repeats of pattern and…

This study considers how adolescents compose historical arguments, and it identifies theoretically grounded predictors of the quality of their essays. Using data from a larger study on the effects of a federally funded Teaching American History grant on student learning, we analyzed students' written responses to document-based questions at the…

Although there is considerable evidence that nouns highlight category-based commonalities, including both those that are perceptually available and those that reflect underlying conceptual similarity, some have claimed that words function merely as features of objects. Here, we directly test these alternative accounts. Four-year-olds (n = 140)…

The precise structure of speech sound representations is still a matter of debate. In the present neurobiological study, we compared predictions about differential sensitivity to speech contrasts between models that assume full specification of all phonological information in the mental lexicon with those assuming sparse representations (only…

Background: Exposure to mathematical pattern tasks is often deemed important for developing children's algebraic thinking skills. Yet, there is a dearth of evidence on the cognitive underpinnings of pattern tasks and how early competencies on these tasks are related to later development. Aims: We examined the domain-specific and domain-general…

"Evidence-centered design" (ECD) is a comprehensive framework for describing the conceptual, computational and inferential elements of educational assessment. It emphasizes the importance of articulating inferences one wants to make and the evidence needed to support those inferences. At first blush, ECD and "educational data…