In this concluding article of the special issue entitled "Identity Formation in Educational Settings", we explicate the notion of identity as an integrative concept, discuss its growing popularity in the social sciences, and point to its special significance to education in contemporary society. Following an Eriksonian psychosocial approach and…

We used a false-biofeedback methodology to manipulate physiological arousal in order to induce affective states that would influence learners' metacognitive judgments and learning performance. False-biofeedback is a method used to induce physiological arousal (and resultant affective states) by presenting learners with audio stimuli of false heart…

Winne and Hadwin (2008) identified four phases of self-regulated learning (SRL) including defining the task, setting goals and making plans, studying (i.e., learning), and adaptation. The vast majority of SRL research has focused on processing during the third phase, studying. In this study, we developed coding rubrics that allowed us to examine…

Classroom level data driven decision-making (DDDM) involves the use of data to identify patterns of performance that reveal students' academic strengths and weaknesses relative to established learning goals, and the planning of instructional practices to support academic success for all students. Although DDDM is not a new paradigm in education,…

Studies examining students' achievement goals, cognitive engagement strategies and performance have found that achievement goals tend to predict classes of cognitive strategy use which predict performance on measures of learning. These studies have led to deeper theoretical understanding, but their reliance on self-report data limit the…

Prior research on collaborative learning identifies student behaviors that significantly predict student achievement, such as giving explanations of one's thinking. Less often studied is the role of teachers' instructional practices in collaboration among students. This article investigates the extent to which teachers engage in practices that…

The present study was designed to test the effect of self-explanation and prediction on the development of principled understanding of novices learning to play chess. First-year psychology students, who had no chess experience, first learned the basic rules of chess and were afterwards divided in three conditions. They either observed (control…

Think-aloud and pre-test data were collected from 49 undergraduates with varying levels of prior domain knowledge to examine the relationship between prior domain knowledge and self-regulated learning with hypermedia. During the experimental session, each participant individually completed a pretest on the circulatory system, and then one 40-min…

Sound symbolism is the notion that there is a subset of words in the world's languages for which sounds and their symbols have some degree of correspondence. Two studies assessed 5th and 6th graders' knowledge of word meanings for English sound symbolic and non-sound symbolic words. Both studies found that the meanings of sound symbolic words were…

By describing the activity theory of learning, this article presents the Soviet position on learning theory and ties psychological research in the USSR to the current Marxist approach to the solution of instructional problems. (BW)

The algo-heuristic theory is concerned with identifying unobservable cognitive processes and their unconscious component cognitive operations, including learning how to describe them algorithmically and heuristically, and how to devise specific instructional tools (algorithmic and heuristic) to develop cognitive processes much faster. (BW)

An analysis of the learning process that focuses on the role of elaboration and students' prior knowledge is presented. Learning from instruction is distinguished from learning and instruction, and a series of learning functions are identified. (TJH)

This study examined the utility of intact and embedded headings as processing aids with nonnarrative text. College students provided with text containing intact and embedded headings outperformed students whose text did not contain these processing aids, especially at delayed testing. Implications of these results and future research issues are…

This study examined the effects of performance patterns and attributional information regarding performance causes on attributions and task persistence in fourth and fifth graders who tended to minimize effort as a cause of school performance. Performance patterns did not influence attributions or persistence. Effort feedback influenced…

This article examines the research on different levels of questions inserted in prose. The first section defines the level of questions and presents a number of theoretical issues. The second section discusses methodological issues in research, such as inadequate directions to subjects. The final section provides recommendations for further…