This chapter illustrates the main warning signals that could help us to detect the flaws of an explanation in physics: internal contradiction (two examples); direct contradiction of a law of physics (one example); indirect contradiction of a law of physics (one example); logical incompleteness of an explanation (three examples); overgeneralization…

Learning naturalistic categories, which tend to have fuzzy boundaries and vary on many dimensions, can often be harder than learning well defined categories. One method for facilitating the category learning of naturalistic stimuli may be to provide explicit feature descriptions that highlight the characteristic features of each category. Although…

Teachers engaging in research has been discussed and carried out under the heuristics and methodologies of action research (Manfra, 2019; Pine, 2009). A typical action research project might involve an individual teacher studying the effectiveness of a specific instructional strategy like having students preview content before receiving direct…

Purpose: In this article, we review the role of retrieval practice on the word learning and retention of children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Following a brief review of earlier findings on word learning in children with SLI and the assumptions behind retrieval practice, four experiments are described that compared novel words…

There is growing pressure to make efficacy experiments more useful. This requires attending to the twin goals of generalizing experimental results to those schools that will use the results and testing the intervention's theory of action. We show how electronic records, created naturally during the daily operation of technology-based…

The past few years have seen a resurgence of faith in experimentation in education inquiry, and particularly in randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Proponents of such research have succeeded in bringing into common parlance the term "gold standard," which suggests that research emerging from any other design frame fails to achieve the…

Faces are processed holistically, so selective attention to 1 face part without any influence of the others often fails. In this study, 3 experiments investigated what type of facial information (shape or surface) underlies holistic face processing and whether generalization of holistic processing to nonexperienced faces requires extensive…

There is a renewed debate about whether educated adults solve simple addition problems (e.g., 2 + 3) by direct fact retrieval or by fast, automatic counting-based procedures. Recent research testing adults' simple addition and multiplication showed that a 150-ms preview of the operator (+ or ×) facilitated addition, but not multiplication,…

Although a large-scale experiment can provide an estimate of the average causal impact for a program, the sample of sites included in the experiment is often not drawn randomly from the inference population of interest. In this article, we provide a generalizability index that can be used to assess the degree of similarity between the sample of…

Phonotactics--constraints on the position and combination of speech sounds within syllables--are subject to statistical differences that gradiently affect speaker and listener behavior (e.g., Vitevitch & Luce, 1999). What statistical properties drive the acquisition of such constraints? Because they are naturally highly correlated, previous…

Children can acquire generic knowledge by sharing in pretend play with more knowledgeable partners. We report 3 experiments in which we investigated how this learning occurs-how children draw generalizations from pretense, and whether they resist doing so for pretense that is unrealistic. In all experiments, preschoolers watched pretend scenarios…

The purpose of this paper is to develop a more general method for sample recruitment in experiments that is purposive (not random) and that results in a sample that is compositionally similar to the generalization population. This work builds on Tipton et al. (2011) by offering solutions to a larger class of problems than the non-overlapping…

Adults often attribute internal dispositions to other people and down-play situational factors as explanations of behavior. A few studies have addressed the origins of this proclivity, but none has examined emotions, which rank among the more important dispositions that we attribute to others. Two experiments (N = 270) explored 15-month-old…

Children have a difficult time in generalizing among changes in background context. We examined the role of two processes that may aid in generalizing category labels in new contexts. In this study, 2-year-old children were taught novel object categories in one type of contextual condition and were tested for category generalization in a new…

Infants' disposition to learn repetitions in the input structure has been demonstrated in pattern generalization (e.g., learning the pattern ABB from the token "ledidi"). This study tested whether a repetition advantage can also be found in lexical learning (i.e., learning the word "lele" vs. "ledi"). Twenty-four…