This contribution looks at the garden that Friedrich Froebel (1782--1852) founded in Bad Blankenburg in 1838 in order to understand the proposal presented at the Kindergarten Model School of Madrid for training teachers in 1879 (the Schools introduced new teaching methods or systems and, at the same time, trained the teachers in their…

Reading involves and is influenced by many factors, which makes reading difficult to understand, teach, and explain to parents, policymakers, and other stakeholders. A metaphor of driving, which likens reading to an everyday practice, demystifies complexities inherent in reading. Both reading and driving are active, strategic processes. Just as…

During language acquisition children generalise at multiple layers of granularity. Ambridge argues that abstraction-based accounts suffer from lumping (over-general abstractions) or splitting (over-precise abstractions). Ambridge argues that the only way to overcome this conundrum is in a purely exemplar/analogy-based system in which…

Interdisciplinary engineering programs have many perceived benefits including developing broader skills and an ability to work with complex real-life problems. However, the development of interdisciplinary programs faces many challenges including how to balance breadth and depth, how to integrate interdisciplinary learning into existing studies…

This response argues against the proposal that novel utterances are formed by analogy with stored exemplars that are close in meaning. Strings of words that are similar in meaning or even identical can behave very differently once inserted into different syntactic environments. Furthermore, phrases with similar meanings but different underlying…

This article reviews two aspects of human learning: (1) people draw inferences that appear to rely on hierarchical conceptual representations; (2) some categories are much easier to learn than others given the same number of exemplars, and some categories remain difficult despite extensive training. Both of these results are difficult to reconcile…

Analogical reasoning has played a significant role in the development of modern mathematical concepts. Although some perspectives in mathematics education have argued against the use of analogies and analogical reasoning in instructional contexts, some attempts have been made to leverage the pedagogical power of analogies. I assert that with a…

The syntactic behaviour of human beings cannot be explained by analogical generalization on the basis of concrete exemplars: analogies in surface form are insufficient to account for human grammatical knowledge, because they fail to hold in situations where they should, and fail to extend in situations where they need to. [For Ben Ambridge's…

In this study, 227 pre-service teachers majoring in special education at two normal universities in eastern China were studied using a questionnaire survey. The survey sought to understand pre-service teachers' beliefs about students and teachers' role in special education, using a metaphor approach. The results are as follows: First, in terms of…

Given the current impact of COVID-19, the learning experiences of Pasifika students within tertiary education has implicated their social and emotional wellbeing. Engaging in a Tongan learning approach, such as "fakalukuluku," can present a viable learning practice for tertiary students' learning experiences. This paper presents the…

Ambridge argues that the existence of exemplar models for individual phenomena (words, inflection rules, etc.) suggests the feasibility of a unified, exemplars-everywhere model that eschews abstraction. The argument would be strengthened by a description of such a model. However, none is provided. I show that any attempt to do so would immediately…

With the present forum contribution, I respond to the paper "Discerning contextual complexities in STEM career pathways--Insights from successful Latinas" by Alejandro Gallard Martínez, Wesley Pitts, Silvia Lizette Ramos de Robles, Katie L. Milton Brkich, Belinda Flores Bustos, and Lorena Claeys. I aim to augment the thoughts of Gallard…

In this study of first-year intercollegiate athletes (N = 2241), we examined predictors of the character-rich qualities of life purpose and integrity. Three dimensions of purpose were included--seeking purpose, found purpose, and purpose beyond-the-self. The predictor variables investigated included contesting orientations, fear of failure, goal…

Though the U.S. health care system is among the best in the developed world, access to chronic care remains a problem for many, in part, because the system is not ideally suited to treat long-term conditions. Consequently, economic and societal costs associated with chronic disease are rising rapidly. To complement traditional pathogenic chronic…

Ethnogeology is the scientific study of human relationships with the Earth as a system, typically conducted within the context of a specific culture. Indigenous or historically resident people may perceive local places differently from outside observers trained in the Western tradition. Ethnogeologic knowledge includes traditional indigenous…