Heightened concerns about the health of the teaching profession highlight the importance of studying the early teacher pipeline. This exploratory, descriptive article examines preservice teachers' expressed motivation for pursuing a teaching career. Using data from a large teacher education program in Texas, we use a natural language processing…

Recent context-control learning studies have shown that switch costs are reduced in a particular context predicting a high probability of switching as compared to another context predicting a low probability of switching. These context-specific switch probability effects suggest that control of task sets, through experience, can become associated…

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) "language universals." One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this…

Tonal languages differ in how they use phonetic correlates, e.g. average pitch height and pitch direction, for tonal contrasts. Thus, native speakers of a tonal language may need to adjust their attention to familiar or unfamiliar phonetic cues when perceiving non-native tones. On the other hand, speakers of a non-tonal language may need to…

Purpose: To see if there is a correlation between interference and short-term memory recall and to examine interference as a factor affecting memory recalling of Arabic and abstract words through free, cued, and serial recall tasks. Method: Four groups of undergraduates in King Saud University, Saudi Arabia participated in this study. The first…

The Vygotsky Blocks Test assesses problem-solving styles within a theoretical framework for the development of higher mental processes devised by Vygotsky. Because both the theory and the associated test situate cognitive development within the child's social and linguistic context, they address conceptual issues around the developmental relation…

This article compares second language test-takers' performance on an academic listening test in an audio-only mode versus an audio-video mode. A new method of classifying video-based visuals was developed and piloted, which used L2 expert opinions to place the video on a continuum from being content-deficient (not helpful for answering…

This study investigates the diversity of early prosocial behavior by examining the ability of ninety-five 2- to 4-year-olds to provide aid to an adult experimenter displaying instrumental need, emotional distress, and material desire. Children provided appropriate aid in response to each of these cues with high consistency over multiple trials. In…

Three alternative mechanisms for age-related decline in memory search have been proposed, which result from either reduced processing speed (global slowing hypothesis), overpersistence on categories (cluster-switching hypothesis), or the inability to maintain focus on local cues related to a decline in working memory (cue-maintenance hypothesis).…

Attentional theories of associative learning and categorization propose that learning about the predictiveness of a stimulus influences the amount of attention that is paid to that stimulus. Three experiments tested this idea by looking at the extent to which stimuli that had previously been experienced as predictive or nonpredictive in a…

Two studies examined how children between ages 4 and 6 use body shape (i.e., the waist-to-hip-ratio [WHR]) for sex categorization. In Study 1 (N = 73), 5- and 6-year-olds, but not 4-year-olds, selected bodies with increasingly discrepant WHRs to be "most like a man" and "most like a woman." Similarly, sex category judgments made by 5- and…

Recent psycholinguistic findings showed that (a) a multi-modal phonetic training paradigm that encodes visual, interactive information is more effective in training L2 learners' perception of novel categories, (b) decreasing the acoustic variance of a phonetic dimension allows the learners to more effectively shift the perceptual weight towards…

This study examined the relationships among question types and levels and students' subsequent responses/interactions in online discussion forums. Question prompts were classified both by type, as outlined by Andrews ("POD Q J Prof Organ Dev Net Higher Education" 2(34):129-163, 1980), and by levels of critical thinking, as outlined by Bloom…

Many studies have explored the contribution of different factors from diverse theoretical perspectives to the explanation of academic performance. These factors have been identified as having important implications not only for the study of learning processes, but also as tools for improving curriculum designs, tutorial systems, and students'…

Despite the fact that categories are often composed of correlated features, the evidence that people detect and use these correlations during intentional category learning has been overwhelmingly negative to date. Nonetheless, on other categorization tasks, such as feature prediction, people show evidence of correlational sensitivity. A…