Understanding how students learn is crucial for helping them succeed. We examined brain function in 107 undergraduate students during a task known to be challenging for many students--physics problem solving--to characterize the underlying neural mechanisms and determine how these support comprehension and proficiency. Further, we applied module…

A critical component of scientific reasoning is the consideration of alternative explanations. Recognizing that decades of cognitive psychology research have demonstrated that relative cognitive accessibility, or "what comes to mind," strongly affects how people reason in a given context, we articulate a simple "cognitive…

The current study used the directed forgetting paradigm in implicit and explicit memory to investigate the concreteness effect. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to explore the neural basis of this phenomenon. The behavioral results showed a clear concreteness effect in both implicit and explicit memory tests; participants responded…

The Common Core State Standards emphasize students writing analytically in response to texts. Questions remain about the nature of instruction that develops students' text-based writing skills. In the present study, we examined the role that writing task quality plays in students' mastery of analytic text-based writing. Text-based writing tasks…

We explored the effects of task-related factors on reasoning processes in geometry focusing on a comparison-of-perimeters task in which the irrelevant feature area interferes with the reasoning process. We studied the effects of congruity, salience, and complexity on participants' accuracy of responses and reaction times. The study shows that…

While many researchers in science education have argued that students' epistemological understanding of models and of modelling processes would influence their cognitive processing on a modelling task, there has been little direct evidence for such an effect. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the relation between students' epistemological…

What is involved in consolidating a new mathematical abstraction? This paper examines the work of one student who was working on a task designed to consolidate two recently constructed absolute function abstractions. The study adopts an activity theoretic model of abstraction in context. Selected protocol data are presented. The initial state of…

We applied a mixed-method research design to investigate the patterns of reasoning used by novice undergraduate chemistry students to classify chemical substances as elements, compounds, or mixtures based on their particulate representations. We were interested in the identification of the representational features that students use to build a…

Two experiments explored the effect of linguistic input on 18-month-olds' ability to form an abstract categorical representation of support. Infants were habituated to 4 support events (i.e., one object placed on another) and were tested with a novel support and a novel containment event. Infants formed an abstract category of support (i.e.,…

Preference scores were determined for several different groups of students ranging in age from seven to adult. In addition, instruments were administered to determine the cognitive level at which the students were capable of functioning. Comparisons between the students' cognitive level and preferences were made. The results indicated that the…

A theory of the nature of mental abilities is presented. In this theory, mental abilities are hierarchically organized into four progressively deeper levels--the levels of composite tasks, subtasks, information-processing components, and information-processing metacomponents. Composite tasks can be decomposed into subtasks, subtasks into…

A total of 72 kindergarteners received eight conservation of number trials which varied in the degree of perceptual support for one-to-one correspondence (four levels) and type of stimuli (toy animals or corks). A between-subjects variable was the method of presentation (standard conservation presentation, a partially fixed array, or a fixed…

Two experiments used the sentence-picture verification paradigm to study encoding and comparison processes with spatial information. Subjects decided whether a spatial description of a geometric figure matched a second figure. Three critical results demonstrated that task-specific variables could be the primary determinants of how subjects verify…

College students learned artificial grammar under two conditions: paired associate learning (PA), and observation of exemplars (OBS). OBS induced abstract representation of the rules of grammar. PA produced very different learning--subjects knew some whole items but detected little structure. Grammar was learned largely by analogy rather than…

An information-processing assessment of the construct validity of aptitude tests is presented. It is stated that aptitude tests have been rather successful because they possess high construct validity, although the constructs in terms of which the tests may be most profitably understood are information-processing rather than psychometric ones. It…