Despite the ongoing debate in academic circles regarding the impact of the arts on individual and collective well-being, there is a paucity of empirical research in this area. Nevertheless, recent studies have begun to establish a significant correlation between arts engagement and a range of positive outcomes. The objective of this study is to…

Carbon cycle pool-and-flux reasoning is a critical facet of climate literacy. This article begins with discussion of why this type of reasoning is both challenging and important. Results from two studies are reported. The first describes students' approaches to carbon cycle pool-and-flux reasoning. The second describes and reports results from an…

Three indicators of undergraduate students' (n = 197) source evaluation were investigated as students completed an academic task requiring the use of multiple texts. The source evaluation metrics examined were students' (1) accessing of document information, (2) trustworthiness ratings, and (3) citation in written responses. All three indicators…

Introduction: This study looked at the effect of community peripheral cues (specifically voting score and answerer's reputation) on the user's credibility rating of answers. Method: Students in technology and philosophy were asked to assess the credibility of answers to questions posted on a social question-answering platform. Through the use of a…

Misconceptions and biases in energy perception could influence people's support for developments integral to the success of restructuring a nation's energy system. Science education, in equipping young adults with the cognitive skills and knowledge necessary to navigate in the confusing energy environment, could play a key role in paving the way…

The central goal of this exploratory study was to characterize the effects of experiments involving different levels of inquiry on the nature of college students' written reflections about laboratory work. Data were collected in the form of individual lab reports written using a science writing heuristic template by a subset of the students…

The effects of attitudes on social memory have not been determined. Some studies have shown attitudes to serve as a heuristic for estimating an answer about past behavior. When an attitude heuristic is applied to recall of an event, "memory" will appear to be "superior," to the extent that the subject's inferences and constructions coincide with…

This study sought to determine: (1) what children understand about "chance" when they begin secondary school?; and (2) how common and how influential the use of informal heuristics, approaches, and biases is in their thinking about probability in the school context. Children's understanding of chance, attributions of events to…

The strategic learning of college and university students begins with their acquisition of knowledge about their academic context and its learning opportunities and demands. However, traditional assessment measures isolate the student outside of the authentic learning context, which limits the information available from these tests. In contrast,…

Discusses Vee mapping, a technique to assist students in categorizing the relationship between the conceptual and procedural aspects of science. Presents a study to investigate elementary education majors' (n=27) use of the Vee heuristic and concept mapping for the construction of knowledge; attitudes toward learning science in collaborative…