Success in chemistry requires not only the ability to recruit prior knowledge but also the ability to establish strong connections between new and existing concepts to form knowledge clusters around core principles. How these knowledge structures are organized can be used to understand the relationships between concepts within a student's mind.…

Although relational reasoning has been described as a process at the heart of human cognition, the exact character of relational representations remains an open debate. Symbolic-connectionist models of relational cognition suggest that relations are structured representations, but that they are ultimately grounded in feature sets; thus, they…

Analogical mapping highlights shared relations that link 2 situations, potentially at the expense of information that does not fit the dominant pattern of correspondences. To investigate whether analogical mapping can alter subsequent recognition memory for features of a source analog, we performed 2 experiments with 4-term proportional analogies…

Taking up analytical issues raised primarily in Dixon (2000) and Dixon & Aikhenvald (2000), this dissertation combines descriptive work with a medium-sized (50-language) typological study. Chapter 1 situates the dissertation against a concise survey of typological-functional work on causative constructions from the last few decades, and…

Cognitive coaching, a process allowing teachers to explore the thinking behind their practice, can reveal incompletely developed areas of individuals' cognitive mapping. Cognitive coaching uses a three-phase cycle (preconference, observation, and postconference) to help teachers improve instructional effectiveness by becoming more reflective about…

This article looks at how behavioral research can be an effective tool to use during the redesign process of university plazas. It also summarizes the research that was conducted at University Union Plaza at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), a 30-year-old plaza that is scheduled to be redesigned. Through the use of behavioral…

This publication offers the 56th Yearbook of the National Reading Conference (NRC). This Yearbook begins with a preface and presents profiles of three awardees, Michael C. McKenna, Douglas K. Hartman, and Michael Kamil. Included in this Yearbook are the following papers: (1) What's It All About? Literacy Research and Civic Responsibility (Victoria…