Research in both cognitive and educational psychology has explored the effect of different types of external knowledge representations (e.g., manipulatives, graphical/pictorial representations, texts) on a variety of important outcome measures. We place this large and multifaceted research literature into an organizing framework, classifying three…

Outlines a general model about the dynamic organization and development of the mind and draws the implications of this model for learning and instruction by presenting 10 postulates about the organization of the mind and 1 general postulate about the dynamic relations between systems of the mind and the mind and education. (SLD)

This paper presents the Featural and Unitary Semantic Space (FUSS) hypothesis of the meanings of object and action words. The hypothesis, implemented in a statistical model, is based on the following assumptions: First, it is assumed that the meanings of words are grounded in conceptual featural representations, some of which are organized…

Suggests that the development of good chemistry teaching and the pursuit of research have essentially the same structure. Similarities include the need for a clear focus, efficiency in time and effort, and a direction that is more often right than wrong. (DDR)

Recent experimental research in the field of neurophysiology has led to the discovery of two classes of visuomotor neurons: canonical neurons and mirror neurons. In light of these studies, we propose here an overview of two classical themes in the cognitive science panorama: James Gibson's theory of affordances and Eleanor Rosch's principles of…

Forgetting in long-term memory, as measured in a recall or a recognition test, is faster for items encoded more recently than for items encoded earlier. Data on forgetting curves fit a power function well. In contrast, many connectionist models predict either exponential decay or completely flat forgetting curves. This paper suggests a…

This study addresses questions about particle physics that focus on the nature of electrons. Speculations as to whether they are more like particles or waves or like neither illustrate the difficulties with which students are confronted when trying to incorporate the concepts of quantum physics into their overall conceptual framework. Such…

This paper describes the electronic ACT-R Bookshelf, a system which supports learning ACT-R, a well-known theory in the field of cognitive psychology, over the World Wide Web. ACT-R Bookshelf is a collection of electronic books on various aspects of ACT-R. The primary role of ACT-R Bookshelf is to serve as a 24-hour information resource for…