Underlying thematic analysis are a few fundamental human cognitive processes, such as categorizing, prototyping and metaphorical mapping. By unpacking these basic processes of human cognition, this paper hopes to provide a cognitive basis for thematic analysis as a foundational method in data analysis for qualitative research. In particular, it…

Background: Cognitive rehabilitation is a complex and specialized area of practice, as it aims to support individuals with diverse neuropsychological profiles, personal characteristics, and intersectionalities in achieving meaningful, functional change in personally relevant aspects of their everyday lives. In many ways, cognitive rehabilitation…

Astronomy has great potential to attract children toward science and improve their scientific literacy. However, it has a relatively small presence within the school curricula worldwide. In Chile, home of the world's largest telescopes, astronomy is even more relevant in science education, but the presence of astronomical content within the…

Cognitive learning complexity identification of assessment questions is an essential task in the domain of education, as it helps both the teacher and the learner to discover the thinking process required to answer a given question. Bloom's Taxonomy cognitive levels are considered as a benchmark standard for the classification of cognitive…

Embedded in a Systemic Functional understanding of education as an initiation into knowledge structures and specific activities, both of which are fundamentally mediated by language, this paper addresses one of the critical concerns around CLIL: a possible mismatch between students' cognitive level and their L2 proficiency. The focus is on acts of…

In 2013, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), working collaboratively with state education agencies, released a set of criteria for states to use to evaluate and procure high-quality assessments. The mathematics section of the document included five content-specific criteria to evaluate alignment of assessments to college- and…

A substantial degree of empirical evidence has illustrated the correlation between spatial skills and performance in engineering education. This evidence has been foundational in the construction of educational interventions which have resulted in both increased levels of spatial ability and increased educational performance and retention.…

The reconciliation of theories of concepts based on prototypes, exemplars, and theory-like structures is a longstanding problem in cognitive science. In response to this problem, researchers have recently tended to adopt either hybrid theories that combine various kinds of representational structure, or eliminative theories that replace concepts…

Existing personalized learning systems (PLSs) have primarily focused on providing learning analytics using data from learners. In this paper, we extend the capability of current PLSs by incorporating data from instructors. We propose a latent factor model that analyzes instructors' preferences in explicitly "excluding" particular…

This paper updates a review of dynamic assessment in education by the first author, published in this journal in 2003. It notes that the original review failed to examine the important conceptual distinction between dynamic testing (DT) and dynamic assessment (DA). While both approaches seek to link assessment and intervention, the former is of…

The history and evolution of science assessment remains poorly known, especially in the context of the exam question contents. Here we analyze the Finnish matriculation examination in biology from the 1920s to 1960s to understand how the exam has evolved in both its knowledge content and educational form. Each question was classified according to…

There has been considerable debate in the literature about the relative merits of information processing versus dynamical approaches to understanding cognitive processes. In this article, we explore the relationship between these two styles of explanation using a model agent evolved to solve a relational categorization task. Specifically, we…

Sensemaking theory suggests that sensemaking may collapse when perception fails to detect weak signals of changes in the environment, cognition fails to appropriately categorize the new data coming from perception, and action fails to test the applicability of new concepts and schemas. Mindfulness-mindlessness theory warns us that routine…

The problem of how people process novel and unexpected information--"deep learning" (Ohlsson in "Deep learning: how the mind overrides experience." Cambridge University Press, New York, 2011)--is central to several fields of research, including creativity, belief revision, and conceptual change. Researchers have not converged…

Understanding the role of "representations" in cognitive science is a fundamental problem facing the emerging framework of embodied, situated, dynamical cognition. To make progress, I follow the approach proposed by an influential representational skeptic, Randall Beer: building artificial agents capable of minimally cognitive behaviors and…