Analogical reasoning has played a significant role in the development of modern mathematical concepts. Although some perspectives in mathematics education have argued against the use of analogies and analogical reasoning in instructional contexts, some attempts have been made to leverage the pedagogical power of analogies. I assert that with a…

Ethnogeology is the scientific study of human relationships with the Earth as a system, typically conducted within the context of a specific culture. Indigenous or historically resident people may perceive local places differently from outside observers trained in the Western tradition. Ethnogeologic knowledge includes traditional indigenous…

Language is one of the hallmarks of intelligence, demanding explanation in a theory of human cognition. However, language presents unique practical challenges for quantitative empirical research, making many linguistic theories difficult to test at naturalistic scales. Artificial neural network language models (LMs) provide a new tool for studying…

Across the globe and throughout history, politics are regularly divided into "left-leaning" and "right-leaning" camps. Explaining the sources of this conservative-liberal divide has become a major quest in the cognitive and social sciences. Early attempts have focused on self-interest as a possible explanation. However, as the…

After an examination of the current issues related to the shortages of nurses and nursing faculty in the United States, the importance of facilitating the transition of interested nurse clinicians into their roles as nurse educators in order to address the decreased number of nurses and nursing faculty became apparent. Mentoring in nursing…

This study examined D.W. Winnicott's construct object usage and related transformational metaphors from a cognitive-linguistic perspective. The paper "The Use of an Object" was positioned historically among extant theoretical models and employed to investigate the semantic evolution of key Winnicottian concepts. Biographical accounts revealed…

This study contributes an approach to understanding the cognitive models underlying rhetorical arguments about the "first wave" of women's rights discourse in the United States, which began to emerge more publically with the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 and started to gain momentum in 1851 and beyond. The usage of the lexical item "sphere" (in…

This dissertation is an analysis of student and teacher conceptualizations of reading and learning in two separate scripted reading intervention environments, as implemented in a combined junior/senior high school in the Midwest. The youngest participants (grades 7-9), with reading levels four to six years below grade level, as defined through…

The dissertation presents a theory of semantics and pragmatics for both language and vision. I focus on sentences including proper names, descriptions, and attitude report verbs, and on the Necker cube. I propose the Open Instruction Theory (OIT), according to which the linguistic meaning of a sentence and the semantic contribution of visual…

This study investigated the types of instructors who teach local history, factors affecting their instruction in the community's past, and instructional practices employed to educate students about a locality's history. It examined teachers' implementation of items from "The Making of Milwaukee" (MOM) project which included a book, DVD…

Problem. The development of critical-thinking skills during the professional training of respiratory therapists is imperative for good practice. Research evidence suggests that interactive instructional strategies are far more effective than traditional lectures. Missing from the literature are thick descriptions of how faculty organize the…