Understanding students' learning of knowledge components (KCs) is an important educational data mining task and enables many educational applications. However, in the domain of computing education, where program exercises require students to practice many KCs simultaneously, it is a challenge to attribute their errors to specific KCs and,…

This commentary discusses how research approaches from Cognitive Network Science can be of relevance to research in the field of Learning Analytics, with a focus on modelling the knowledge representations of learners and students as a network of interrelated concepts. After providing a brief overview of research in Cognitive Network Science, I…

In order to develop an expert-like mental model of complex systems, causal reasoning is essential. This study examines the differences between forward and backward instructional strategies in terms of efficiency, students' learning and progression of their mental models of the electronic transport chain in an undergraduate metabolism course…

This paper draws attention to the literature in the areas of learning, specifically, constructivism, conceptual change and cognitive development. It emphasizes the contribution of such research to our understanding of the learning process. This literature provides guidelines for teachers, at all levels, in their attempt to have their students…

Although exploring students' thought processes can be rewarding, most teachers rely heavily on reponses to tests and assignments that fail to disclose learners' thinking patterns. Concept maps grouping interrelated ideas can encourage students to demonstrate effective and meaningful assimilation of organized study areas. Includes five footnotes.…

A major error in cognitive science has been to suppose that the meaning of a representation in the mind is known prior to its production. Representations are inherently perceptual--constructed by a perceptual process and given meaning by subsequent perception of them. The person perceiving the representation determines what it means. This premise…

Reviews Karmiloff-Smith's "Beyond Modularity," suggesting that her work highlights phenomena that seem counter intuitive when regarded from current developmental frameworks, and advocates that understanding them requires more complex perspectives than can be supported by either extreme nativist or domain-general models of cognitive…

The science learning cycle developed by Robert Karplus and others in the 1960's has been a useful model for many science teachers and researchers. This model stresses the use of structured inquiry to organize knowledge acquisition and problem solving. Recent research in the cognitive science tradition, however, has shown that learning and problem…

Students with learning disabilities work to avoid difficult tasks while trying to appear competent ("passing"). They also check, monitor, and evaluate their actions, a form of "metacognition." These are flip sides of the same coin of strategic interaction and are context-bound, not context-free activities. (Author/LHW)

Comments on Flavell's paper (PS 522 962) presented in the same issue. Stresses some of the positive aspects of preschoolers' conception of thinking, and raises questions about the relatively negative portrait of young child's introspective abilities. Discusses evidence of introspection among preschoolers, and underlines the special, and…

Comments on Flavell's paper in this issue. Examines the paper's findings on three different aspects of children's knowledge about thinking: their ability to differentiate thinking from other activities, their awareness that thinking is always going on in people's minds, and their capacity for introspection into their own thinking. Argues that…

Like any apparently novel approach to the basic epistemological problems of "knowledge," the constructivist ideas that have spread in the last 20 years continue to generate a host of negative as well as a few positive reactions. This document focuses on some aspects of Radical Constructivism, as distinct from "trivial"…

Effects on learning of most principal independent variables can be generalized within, but not between, five different categories: intellectual skills, verbal information, cognitive strategies, motor skills, and attitudes. Psychological research has been and continues to be well-served by this categorization. (GC)

Reports results of 14 studies on children's knowledge about thinking. Suggests that preschoolers appear to know that thinking is an internal mental activity that can refer to real or imaginary objects or events. However, preschoolers are poor at determining when a person is and is not thinking. This shortcoming is considerably less evident in…

An overarching learning theory is presented, based on assumptions that all learning includes (1) external learner-environment interaction and internal acquisition and elaboration and (2) cognitive, emotional, and social dimensions. The framework depicts four types of learning: cumulative, assimilative, accommodative, and transformative. (Contains…