The construct of metacognition appears in an ever increasing number and range of contexts in educational, developmental, and cognitive psychology. Can it retain its status as a useful construct in the face of such diverse application? Or is it merely an umbrella term for diverse mental phenomena that are loosely if at all connected? Here I argue…

Instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) research has recently attracted more focal attention due to the publications of three books and as the theme of the 2016 Second Language Research Forum (SLRF) conference that celebrated its 35th anniversary in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). Recent definitions (e.g. Loewen, 2015) have…

This research confirms that incorporating concepts of Ba and Omoi with action research promoteshigher levels of learning. Currently, action research, Ba, and Omoi are understudied in militaryinstitutions and college programs. Using a case study approach and two cycles of action research, thisproject addressed how learning occurred for students and…

In judgment and categorization, the task is to infer the criterion value of an object based on cues. The cognitive mechanisms underlying such inferences are often distinguished in terms of whether they rely on an abstracted cue-criterion rule or on retrieving exemplars. The use of cue-based and exemplar-based strategies (and the associated…

The theory of natural pedagogy has proposed that infants can use ostensive signals, including eye contact, infant-directed speech, and contingency to learn from others. However, the role of bodily gestures, such as hand-waving, in social learning has been largely ignored. To address this gap in the literature, this study sought to determine…

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is widely used to study decision-making within healthy and psychiatric populations. However, the complexity of the IGT makes it difficult to attribute variation in performance to specific cognitive processes. Several cognitive models have been proposed for the IGT in an effort to address this problem, but currently no…

Instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) has been referenced in the larger field of the SLA literature for over two and a half decades. Currently, there are several theoretical underpinnings accounting for processes assumed to play a role in ISLA and quite an impressive number of studies have empirically addressed some aspect(s) of ISLA.…

The study is an attempt to find out the influence of assessment process on students higher order learning in science subjects in Bangladesh. The main objectives of the study are: (1) to identify the nature of the question items of science subjects; (2) to examine what kind of learning is influenced by the question items; and (3) to identify the…

Foundational studies in decision making focused on behavior as the most accessible and reliable data on which to build theories of choice. More recent work, however, has incorporated neural data to provide insights unavailable from behavior alone. Among other contributions, these studies have validated reinforcement learning models by…

Does valence play a role in children's sensitivity to and use of moral information in the service of selective learning? In the present experiment, we explored this question by presenting 3- to 5-year-old children with informants who behaved in ways consistent or inconsistent with sociomoral norms, such as helping a peer retrieve a toy or…

The aim of this study was to examine the relationships amongst students' test emotions of hope and hopelessness, their antecedents of cognitive control and value appraisals and volitional strategies during learning, as well as their effects on academic achievement in the domain of mathematics, using the control-value theoretical framework. Sample…

The amygdala is a key area of the brain where the emotional memories are stored throughout the lifespan. It is well established that synapses in the lateral nucleus of amygdala (LA) can undergo long-term potentiation, a putative cellular correlate of learning and memory. However, a type of short-term synaptic plasticity, known as…

The mammalian olfactory system is well established for its remarkable capability of undergoing experience-dependent plasticity. Although this process involves changes at multiple stages throughout the central olfactory pathway, even the early stages of processing, such as the olfactory bulb and piriform cortex, can display a high degree of…

The study of song learning and the neural song system has provided an important comparative model system for the study of speech and language acquisition. We describe some recent advances in the bird song system, focusing on the role of off-line processing including sleep in processing sensory information and in guiding developmental song…

In seeking an understanding of the teenage brain, this author was struck by the interplay between the development of executive functioning and the development of the system that controls emotions and memory. This in turn has impacted her work as a member of faculty at a seminary with responsibilities for both directing a program with high school…