Large-scale numeracy assessments are intended to facilitate the improvement of educational outcomes; however, it is not clear exactly how this is to be achieved. To move towards the goal of numeracy for all, it is necessary to systematically address issues that are known to be difficult, pervasive and persistent. This paper includes an analysis of…

Think aloud data were gathered from 19 subjects solving three statistical problems. Good problem solvers differed from poor in that they (1) more often clarified essential concepts related to the problem, or (2) appeared to attend more closely to what was actually asked for in the problem. (Author/SJL)

Five experiments demonstrated that 6.5-month-olds perseverated in a violation-of-expectation task to examine reasoning about width information in containment events. After watching a familiarization event in which a ball was lowered into a wide container, infants failed to detect the violation when the same ball was lowered into a container half…

This study investigated whether undergraduate students encode spurious correlations in memory and exhibit them during the learning process leading to ineffectual problem solving. Findings suggested that even experienced students relied on surface-structure feature-algorithm correlations for solving new problems. Findings pose implications for…

In contrast with younger children of the same reading age, reading-disabled (RD) children performed poorly when they were required to independently abstract grapheme-phoneme (g-p) rules and use them to pronounce pseudowords. Results suggest a phonologically based productive deficit which interferes with the learning of g-p rules. (RH)

Studies in the past have shown that reinforcements independent of the subjects actions may induce a feeling of helplessness. Most experiments on learned helplessness have led researchers to believe that uncontrollability (non-contingency of feedback upon response) was the determining feature of learned helplessness, although in most studies…