I consider three aspects of children's thinking about religious phenomena. It displays intriguing parallels with their thinking about scientific phenomena; it has an impact on their moral behavior; and it is likely to impact their religious experience. Children's gradual conceptual progress in the domain of religion resembles their conceptual…

Generating own examples for previously encountered new concepts is a common and highly effective learning activity, at least when the examples are of high quality. Unfortunately, however, students are not able to accurately evaluate the quality of their own examples and instructional support measures such as idea unit standards that have been…

Two themes emerge from studies of the development of symbolic understanding; that development proceeds through multiple levels of understanding prior to full and reflective knowledge of the representational function of pictorial symbols, and that development is founded upon individual cognitive and social cognitive proclivities as well as on…

This study aimed to analyze the abstraction process of twelve-grade students' continuity knowledge through the RBC+C abstraction model. With this aim, a semi-constructed interview was conducted with two twelfth-grade students and recorded with a video camera. Two different research problems were addressed in the interview, and the students were…

Purpose: As online learning has become more prevalent, how learners interact with each other in those learning environments has become more salient. To develop effective levels of interaction, students must feel comfortable to express their ideas and views. For this reason, this paper aims to look at how individual students' levels of social…

Existing evidence suggests that children, when they first pass standard theory-of-mind tasks, still fail to understand the essential aspectuality of beliefs and other propositional attitudes: such attitudes refer to objects only under specific aspects. Oedipus, for example, believes Yocaste (his mother) is beautiful, but this does not imply that…

Organic chemistry education is one of the youngest research areas among all chemistry related research efforts, and its published scholarly work has become vibrant and diverse over the last 15 years. Research on problem-solving behavior, students' use of the arrow-pushing formalism, the investigation of students' conceptual knowledge and…

The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of a sociocognitive teaching strategy on young children's understanding of light. It explores their understanding of the concept of light as an entity that is transmitted independently of the light source and the final receiver. The study was conducted in three phases: pretest, teaching…

Most research on children's conception of death has probed their understanding of its biological aspects: its inevitability, irreversibility and terminal impact. Yet many adults subscribe to a religious conception implying that death marks the beginning of a new life. Two recent empirical studies confirm that in the course of development, children…

Presents a short biography of one of the winners of the American Psychological Association's Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology (2012). Thomas L. Griffiths won the award for bringing mathematical precision to the deepest questions in human learning, reasoning, and concept formation. In his pioneering work,…

This study gives insights into how Logo-like microworlds can affect cognitive development related to mathematics education of students with math learning difficulties. In particular, we analyse the case of a 15-year-old student with dyslexia and severe dyscalculia. Among the various cognitive aspects involved, here we delve into the development of…

Is processing of conceptual information as robust as processing of perceptual information early in development? Existing empirical evidence is insufficient to answer this question. To examine this issue, 3- to 5-year-old children were presented with a flexible categorization task, in which target items (e.g., an open red umbrella) shared category…

Science educators have long been concerned with how formal schooling contributes to learners' capacities to engage with science after school. This article frames productive engagement as fundamentally about the coordination of claims with evidence, but such coordination requires a number of reasoning capabilities to evaluate the strength of…

Do we perceive correctly whether a 2-D object is balanced or unbalanced? What would be the cause of biased equilibrium judgments? In two psychometric studies, we varied independently the characteristics of the objects and the equilibrium states. First, we observed that observers were excessively sensitive to the eccentricity of the object top.…

The Lawson Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning (LCTSR) was used to gauge the relative effectiveness of three different methods of pedagogy, "Reading, Presenting, and Questioning" (RPQ), "Experimenting and Discussion" (ED), and "Traditional Methods" (TM), on increasing students' level of scientific thinking. The…