Processing of multiple representations in multimedia learning environments is considered to help learners obtain a more complete overview of the domain and gain deeper knowledge. This is based on the idea that relating and translating different representations leads to reflection beyond the boundaries and details of the separate representations.…

Adult developmental mathematics students often work under great pressure to complete the mathematics sequences designed to help them achieve success (Bryk & Treisman, 2010). Results of a teaching experiment demonstrate how the ability to reason can be impeded by flaws in students' mental representations of mathematics. The earnestness of the…

Humans and animals can perform much more complex tasks than they can acquire using pure trial and error learning. This gap is filled by teaching. One important method of instruction is shaping, in which a teacher decomposes a complete task into sub-components, thereby providing an easier path to learning. Despite its importance, shaping has not…

Our research aims to identify domain-specific similarities and differences of externalized cognitive structures. Cognitive structure, also known as knowledge structure or structural knowledge, is conceived as the manner in which an individual organizes the relationships of concepts in memory. By diagnosing these structures precisely, even…

This study explores young children's abstraction of the rules underlying a robot's emergent behavior. The study was conducted individually with six kindergarten children, along five sessions that included description and construction tasks, ordered by increasing difficulty. We developed and used a robotic control interface, structured as…

Assigning difficulty level indicators to the knowledge units helps the learners plan their learning activities more efficiently. This paper focuses on how to use the topology of a knowledge map to compute and rank the difficulty levels of knowledge units. Firstly, the authors present the hierarchical structure and properties of the knowledge map.…

University education often suffers from a lack of an explicit and adaptable didactic design. Students complain about the insufficient adaptability to the learners' needs. Learning content and services need to reach their audience according to their different prerequisites, needs, and different learning styles and conditions. A way to overcome such…

This paper explores the use of design patterns and anti-patterns in teaching human-computer interaction principles. Patterns are increasingly popular and are seen as an efficient knowledge transfer mechanism in many fields, including software development in the field of software engineering, and more recently in the field of human-computer…

We present an inference algorithm for perturbation models based on Poisson regression. The algorithm is designed to handle unclassified input with multiple errors described by independent mal-rules. This knowledge representation provides an intelligent tutoring system with local and global information about a student, such as error classification…

The objective of this study was to identify changes in dominant preferred learning styles of students based on instructional presentation of course content. This study evaluates dominant preferred learning styles of two groups of university students. The first group of students was enrolled in a course that introduces graphical representation in…

Knowledge partitioning is a theoretical construct holding that knowledge is not always integrated and homogeneous but may be separated into independent parcels containing mutually contradictory information. Knowledge partitioning has been observed in research on expertise, categorization, and function learning. This article presents a theory of…

In 3 experiments, the authors examined the role of knowledge activation in the suppression of contextually irrelevant meanings for ambiguous homographs. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants with greater baseball knowledge, regardless of reading skill, more quickly suppressed the irrelevant meaning of ambiguous words in baseball-related, but not…

Semantic and orthographic learning of new words was investigated with the help of the picture-word interference (PWI) task. In this version of the Stroop task, picture naming is delayed by the simultaneous presentation of a semantically related as opposed to an unrelated distractor word (a specific PWI effect), as well as by an unrelated word…

This paper describes dissertation research using cognitive psychology in the design of museum exhibit labels in an effort to increase learning and memory in museum visitors. Three studies focused on factors affecting whether or not using a question (instead of a statement) as a title on a museum exhibit label would increase the visitor's memory of…

Discusses distributed cognition theory, a viable framework and methodology for examining interactions between individuals and artifacts, and how it relates to performance support. Highlights include knowledge representation; applications in learning and performance support; learning communities; collaborative learning; and computer technology and…