Individuals have difficulty changing their causal beliefs in light of contradictory evidence. We hypothesized that this difficulty arises because people facing implausible causes give greater consideration to causal alternatives, which, because of their use of a positive test strategy, leads to differential weighting of contingency evidence.…

Theories of learning and instruction usually are grounded in psychological and epistemological assumptions. However, these theories ignore the child in relation to his or her cultural and institutional context and ignore the schoolteacher from the social context that regulates the process of transmission and acquisition of knowledge and skills.…