Learning takes time: Performance usually starts poorly and improves with practice. Do children intuit this basic phenomenon of skill learning? In preregistered Experiment 1 (n = 125; 54% female; 48% White; collected 2022-2023), US 7- to 8-year-old children predicted improved performance, 5- to 6-year-old children predicted flat performance, and…

An inherent component of tool-use actions is the transformation of the user's operating movement into the desired effect. In this study, the relevance of this transformation for young children's learning of tool-use actions was investigated. Sixty-four children at the age of 27-30 months learned to use levers which either simply extended…

Procedural fidelity is defined as the extent to which the independent variable is implemented as prescribed. Research using computerized tasks has shown that fidelity errors involving consequences for behavior can hinder skill acquisition. However, studies examining the effects of these errors once skills have been mastered are lacking. Thus, this…

Recent instructional reforms in science education aim to change the way students engage in learning in the discipline, as they describe that students are to engage with disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and the practices of science to make sense of phenomena (NRC, 2012). For such sensemaking to become a reality, there is a need to…

Secondary school students often learn new cognitive skills by practicing with tasks that vary in difficulty, amount of support and/or content. Occasionally, they have to select these tasks themselves. Studies on task-selection guidance investigated either procedural guidance (specific rules for selecting tasks) or strategic guidance (general rules…

This study consists of a 17-year (2006-2021) systematic literature review on the effective instructional strategies for developing Computational Thinking (CT) in primary school students (K-5). The aim of this paper is to identify instructional strategies that have been implemented and evaluated by means of a pre- and post-test, with the aim of…

K-12 students are expected to acquire competence in data display as part of developing statistical literacy. To support research, assessment design, and instruction, we developed a hypothesized learning progression (LP) using existing empirical literature in the fields of mathematics and statistics education. The data display LP posits a…

Emphasis manipulation is a way to help learners by directing their attention to particular subcomponents of a learning task. This study investigated the effects of different approaches to emphasis manipulation on knowledge transfer and cognitive load. This was done by examining the impact of three task selection strategies: system-controlled,…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of external feedback in auditory perceptual learning of school-age children as compared with that of adults. Method: Forty-eight children (7-9 years of age) and 64 adults (20-35 years of age) conducted a training session using an auditory frequency discrimination (difference limen for…

This article explores the perceived disconnect between informal and formal musical knowledge, through a focused case study which aligned students' informal knowledge with aspects of the formal curriculum. The upper high school or senior secondary student participants had a background in the creation and performance of popular and contemporary…

Performance on verbal and mathematical tasks is enhanced when participants shift from using algorithms to retrieving information directly from memory (Siegler, 1988a). However, it is unknown whether a shift to retrieval is involved in dynamic spatial skill acquisition. For example, do athletes mentally extrapolate the trajectory of the ball, or do…

Although the use of technology for pragmatics instruction has attracted significant attention from scholars, the number of studies regarding the impact of self-access materials to this end is limited. Nearpod is a useful cloud-based application to support self-paced learning. This paper aims to probe the effect of learning through Nearpod on EFL…

Background: As the maker movement is increasingly adopted into K-12 schools, students are developing new competences in exploration and fabrication technologies. This study assesses learning with these technologies in K-12 makerspaces and FabLabs. Purpose: Our study describes the iterative process of developing an assessment instrument for this…

Studies of the "testing effect" have shown that retrieval significantly improves learning. However, most of these studies have been restricted to simple types of declarative verbal knowledge. Five experiments were designed to explore whether testing improves acquisition of route knowledge, which has a procedural component consisting of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop a set of generic prompting principles and a framework of prompts that have the potential to foster learning and skill acquisition among adult novices when performing complex, ill-structured problems. Design/methodology/approach: Relevant research in the literatures surrounding problem structure,…