The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of an intervention designed to foster epistemic change over the course of 1 semester. The intervention was based on constructivist teaching practices that incorporated teacher modeling of critical thinking of content, evaluation of multiple approaches to solving problems, and making…

How does learning about scientists' struggles during their scientific knowledge building affect students' science learning? Two hundred and seventy-one high school students were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions: (a) the struggle-oriented background information (n = 90) condition, which presented students with stories about 3 scientists'…

Prior studies have not tested whether an instructional intervention aimed at improving metacognitive skills results in changes to student metacognition, motivation, learning, and future learning in the classroom. We examined whether a 6-hr intervention designed to teach the declarative and procedural components of planning, monitoring, and…

Studies differences in boys' and girls' (N=158) mathematical problem-solving behavior in relation to two types of tasks, computations and applications. Differences were dependent on contents of tasks and gender. Girls rated themselves lower on confidence and attributed bad results more often to lack of capacity and to the task difficulty. No…

The influence of an adult model's degree of persistence and statements of confidence were studied with 100 first and second grade Black and Hispanic children from a lower-class, urban school. The model duration of performance and statements of confidence increased the children's degree of persistence. (Author/GK)

Subjects who were preparing to teach scored reliably higher than controls on a subsequent retention test. In experiment 2, for both a verbal and a problem-solving task, subjects either worked alone, verbalized their thoughts or taught another person the task while performing. There were no reliable differences. (Author/CP)