This research examined whether the informational advantage of an animation over a static picture (and over no visualizations as a control condition) can be compensated by presenting the information in the text that constitutes this informational advantage. In addition, it was investigated whether learners' spatial abilities acted as a compensator…

The current study investigated how perceived popularity and collaboration quality were associated with knowledge gain of adolescents during a collaborative learning task. Participants included 264 children ages 10-12 years (52.3% boys), who collaborated 3 times in same-sex dyads on a computer assignment. Results indicated that the knowledge of the…

Classical educational research provides empirical evidence of the positive effect of doing homework on academic results. Nonetheless, when this effect is analyzed in detail there are inconsistent, and in some cases, contradictory results. The central aim of this study was to systematically investigate the effect of homework on performance of…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of an intervention designed to foster epistemic change over the course of 1 semester. The intervention was based on constructivist teaching practices that incorporated teacher modeling of critical thinking of content, evaluation of multiple approaches to solving problems, and making…

This study examined whether familiarity with content influences performance on conditional reasoning problems of the form P implies Q independently of ease of generation of specific examples of "Q and not-P." Results indicated that increased content familiarity resulted in higher performance levels. (Author/JAZ)