Creativity is typically defined as the generation of novel and useful ideas or artifacts. This generative capacity is crucial to everyday problem solving, technological innovation, scientific discovery, and the arts. A central concern of cognitive scientists is to understand the processes that underlie human creative thinking. We review evidence…

That creativity can play a role in learning seems clear. Indeed, creativity researchers and educational scholars have long asserted that theories of learning need to be broadened to include creative cognition. What is less clear, however, is the specific nature of that role. The purpose of this article is to introduce a new model of creative…

The present two studies investigated whether semantic as well as evaluative stimulus aspects can be conditioned to neutral stimuli. In Study 1, pictures of large and small objects were paired with neutral stimuli (conditioned stimuli (CSs)). The subsequently assessed size and likeability ratings indicated that valence as well as size was…

The central research question of the study asks: how do middle school students experience learning mathematics in middle school mathematics class? The additional research questions that guide the study ask: what are some of the barriers to learning mathematics in middle school mathematics class and what causes students to understand certain…

Results of a study involving 24 developmentally delayed preschoolers revealed that training on two or fewer exemplars of a stimulus class was sufficient to produce concept acquisition regardless of the training program employed (stimulus fading, stimulus delay, or reinforcement only). (CL)

C. L. Gagn? and E. J. Shoben (1997) proposed that concepts are combined via external relations and that lexical entries include information about which relations are frequent for every modifying noun. As evidence for this view, they showed that relations associated with the modifier affected the interpretation of combinations in several studies in…

This article explores relationships between designing and making in the work of children within the age range 5-11 when engaged in practical modelling tasks. The notion of the model is explored from the perspective of concrete representations. It is suggested that concrete models may be used as hypotheses from which to test ideas about the nature…

After learning to categorize a set of alien-like stimuli in the context of a story, a group of 5-year-old children and adults judged pairs of stimuli from different categories to be less similar than did groups not learning the category distinction. In a same-different task, the learning group made more errors on pairs of non-identical stimuli…

The purpose of the two experiments was to assess the effects of two levels of stimulus redundancy and three levels of irrelevant visual stimulation on performance in a successive discrimination task and a reproduction task. The results indicate that increases in redundancy facilitated performance in the reproduction task but had no appreciable…

Purpose of this study was to examine the correspondence between digraph analysis of content structure and word associations. (Author)

This study investigated the spontaneous use of verbal mediators in discrimination learning, the transfer of mediators to a free recall task, and the effects of a pretraining task on performance. The discrimination tasks required nursery school children (80) to: (1) sort three instances each of two different concepts in a conceptually consistent…

To assess the importance of visual attributes relative to acoustic and semantic attributes in children's encoding, a 64-item recognition test was administered to first- and sixth-grade children. Recognition items were linedrawings of simple objects accompanied by aural labels. By manipulating the picture, label, and referent in various…

Scientists and students often believe that if they just think harder about a problem, a solution will follow. However, thinking about one's thinking, or using metacognition, can be a more productive expenditure of mental energy. Introducing students to metacognition allows them to discover the value of reflection. This article presents a lesson on…