This study investigates the role of representational competence in student responses to an assessment of hydrogen bonding. The assessment couples the use of a multiple-select item ("Choose all that apply") with an open-ended item to allow for an examination of students' cognitive processes as they relate to the assignment of hydrogen…

Diverse implicit cognitive elements seem to support but also constrain reasoning in different domains. Many of these cognitive constraints can be thought of as either implicit assumptions about the nature of things or reasoning heuristics for decision-making. In this study we applied this framework to investigate college students' understanding of…

The characterization of students' cognitive biases is of central importance in the development of curriculum and teaching strategies that better support student learning in science. In particular, the identification of shortcut reasoning procedures (heuristics) used by students to reduce cognitive load can help us devise strategies to foster the…

The purpose of this study was to reconstruct writers' reasoning process as reflected in their written texts. The codes resulting from the text analysis were related to cognitive operations, ranging from simple to more sophisticated ones. The sequence of the cognitive operations as the text unfolded represents the writer's cognitive pathway at the…