When learning new information, should students focus on studying 1 concept at a time or should they alternate studying between different concepts? Recent research shows that students should mix up or interleave the study of different concepts, particularly when the concepts are related or hard to discriminate (Carvalho & Goldstone, 2015). But…

How do people acquire knowledge about which individuals belong to different cliques or communities? And to what extent does this learning process differ from the process of learning higher-order information about complex associations between nonsocial bits of information? Here, the authors use a paradigm in which the order of stimulus presentation…

Jurgen Habermas offered a revolutionary way of thinking about the relationship between knowledge, learning, and the human condition in knowledge and human interests. He provided us with a powerful means of understanding the unity in diversity of human learning. The article presents a philosophical framework that enables vocational and adult…

Retrieval practice is a learning strategy that has repeatedly been found to have positive effects on memory and learning. However, studies indicate that students rarely use retrieval practice on a voluntary basis. The objective of the present study was to examine students' self-regulated use of retrieval practice, and to determine whether sex and…

How people conceptualize learning is related to real-world educational consequences across many domains of education. Despite its centrality to the educational system, we know little about how the public reasons about language acquisition, and the potential consequences for their thinking about real-world issues (e.g., policy endorsements). The…

Word learning in young children requires coordinated attention between language input and the referent object. Current accounts of word learning are based on spoken language, where the association between language and objects occurs through simultaneous and multimodal perception. In contrast, deaf children acquiring American Sign Language (ASL)…

Aptitude-treatment interaction (ATI) research is of both theoretical and practical interest to second language (L2) learning, since it provides insights into the processes linking learner-internal individual difference factors and learner-external contextual variables including instructional approach--variables that jointly determine L2 outcomes.…

In many contexts of multilingualism, language learners can initiate communication in the target language (TL), or a contact language (such as English). Patterns of use emerging from these choices affect TL development. They also vary between individuals. Willingness to communicate (WTC) needs to be investigated in ways that capture these…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to provide a tutorial on statistical learning and its role in learning to spell and to discuss the implications of the research for educators. Method: The tutorial begins with a discussion of statistical learning and its characteristics. It then discusses research on how statistical learning plays out in…

Purpose: Professional training courses play an important role for higher education instructors and their teaching quality. However, participants strongly differ in how much they learn in these courses. The present study seeks to explain these differences by focusing on attention as a central aspect of their behavioral engagement that can stem from…

Traditional research into individual differences (ID) in second language (L2) learning is based on group studies with the implicit assumption that findings can be generalized to the individual. In this article, we challenge this view. We argue that L2 learners do not form ergodic ensembles and that language learning data lack stability. The data…

Background: The need to focus more on children's abilities to change requires new assessment technologies in education. Process-oriented assessment can be useful in this regard. Dynamic testing has the potential to provide in-depth information about children's learning processes and cognitive abilities. Aim: This study implemented a…

In many contexts of multilingualism, language learners can initiate communication in the target language (TL), or a contact language (such as English). Patterns of use emerging from these choices vary between individuals and affect TL development. Willingness to communicate (WTC) needs to be investigated in ways that capture these variations. So…

Recent research about the learning of science has suggested that misconceptions are not replaced by scientific conceptions and extinguished once conceptual change has occurred. Rather, misconceptions still exist alongside the acquired scientific conceptions and must be suppressed in order to use scientific conceptions. Our goal in this review is…

Echocardiographers are highly specialised, skilled practitioners who play a critical role in medical imaging diagnostics. Yet, little is known about the cognitive and perceptual attributes of experts within this domain. This study was designed to examine the role of individual differences in expertise. Specifically, the contribution of a domain…