The present research examined the varieties of poor metaphors to gain insight into the cognitive processes involved in generating creative ones. Drawing upon data from two published studies as well as a new sample, adults' open-ended responses to different metaphor prompts were categorized. Poor metaphors fell into two broad clusters.…

The present study examines university students' perceptions of learning academic terminology and using specialised language, and discusses the consequences of their vision. The aim is to elucidate the relationship between academic culture, academic education and the construction of knowledge in higher education. The fields of meaning and the level…

Entropy is a central concept in thermodynamics, but has been found to be challenging to students due to its abstract nature and the fact that it is not part of students' everyday language. Interviews with three pairs of engineering students (N = 6) were conducted and video recorded regarding their interpretation and use of the entropy concept, one…

The Children's Attitudes Toward the Elderly (CATE) is designed to assess the attitudes of children, ages 3 to 11, towards the elderly through analysis of the affective, behavioral, and knowledge components of attitudes. To achieve a balanced sample of test items for each domain, four measurement techniques are used: open-ended questions; semantic…

The way students, aged 12 through 16, ascribed meaning to coded words representing historical terms, based on contextual clues, was studied. Intelligence, grammatical ability, cultural background, and interest in history were also examined. (Author/MH)