Statistics education researchers have been challenged to consider the theory of inferentialism in understanding concept formation in students. A critique of inferentialism is that no comprehensive method has been formulated to use the theory in practice. In this paper an inferentialism-based framework is presented that appears to be capable of…

Since statistical inference is a probabilistic generalization about a population analyzed on the basis of a sample, inferential reasoning demands producing reasons ("statistical" and "contextual") to substantiate and validate generalizations. To convey an understanding of students' inferential reasoning, we present a…

Even once children can accurately remember their experiences, they nevertheless struggle to use those memories in flexible new ways--as in when drawing inferences. However, it remains an open question as to whether the developmental differences observed during both memory formation and inference itself represent a fundamental limitation on…

Although there is wide evidence on young children's category learning, questions concerning how cognitive mechanisms and social mediation work collaboratively in this process remain sparse. Here, we study the impact of pedagogy in young children's categorization of novel artifacts. A before-and-after micro-genetic study compared 58 3-year-old…

For successful learning, students need to evaluate their learning status relative to their learning goals and regulate their study in response to such monitoring. The present study investigated whether making metacognitive judgments on previously studied text would enhance the learning of that studied (backward effect) and newly studied text…

Narrative inquiry is a type of qualitative research that explores human experiences through lived or told stories to understand a phenomenon. Narrative researchers collect data through spoken or written stories and life experiences of an individual (subject). The data is examined in chronological order to understand the meaning of the phenomenon…

How do people learn about things that they have never perceived or inferred--like molecules, miracles or Marie-Antoinette? For many thinkers, trust is the answer. Humans rely on communicated information, sometimes even when it contradicts blatantly their firsthand experience. We investigate the early ontogeny of this trust using a non-verbal…

This study investigated whether an instructor's gestures can signal the underlying conceptual structure of a lesson and foster learning. In Experiment 1, 123 undergraduates watched a video comparing eastern and western steamboats in which the instructor produced structure gestures, surface gestures, structure and surface gestures, or neither…

Researchers across many fields have called for greater attention to heterogeneity of treatment effects--shifting focus from the average effect to variation in effects between different treatments, studies, or subgroups. True heterogeneity is important, but many reports of heterogeneity have proved to be false, non-replicable, or exaggerated. In…

The current study reported an empirical investigation that tested the collective and individual effects of morphological awareness and cognate awareness on Japanese word learning among Chinese learners of Japanese. 131 Chinese learners of Japanese participated in this study. They completed morphological awareness measurements (morpheme…

The writing system -- the transparency of orthography in alphabet-based systems and differences between logographic and phonetic-based systems -- can affect the efficiency of inferential word learning when words are introduced visually. It can also shape how people self-evaluate their learning success (we refer to such type of self-evaluation as…

Learning in any domain depends on how the data for learning are represented. In the domain of language acquisition, children's representations of the speech they hear determine what generalizations they can draw about their target grammar. But these input representations change over development as a function of children's developing linguistic…

Understanding scientific phenomena requires learners to construct mental models of causal systems. Simulation-based discovery learning offers learners the opportunity to construct mental models and test them against the behavior of a simulation. The purpose of this study was to investigate sequential patterns of learner actions and utterances…

In undergraduate mathematics, deductive reasoning plays important roles in teaching and learning various ideas, and is primarily characterized by the concept of logical implication. This comes up whenever conditional statements are applied, i.e., one checks if a statement's hypotheses are satisfied and then makes inferences. In calculus, students…

It is known that oral history studies have a positive effect on students' learning, skills, attitudes, and motivations. In this direction, it has an important place in the context of student-centered constructivist practices in teaching different subjects in social studies courses. Social studies teachers should have sufficient knowledge and…