Students' issues dealing with reflection tasks, especially with inclined mirror lines, are widely known. Previous research conducted with primary school students mainly focussed on task difficulty and students' outcomes, especially their errors of reflection. Little is known about which not obviously sustainable understanding of reflection leads…

The More A-More B intuitive rule has become a research hotspot in the field of mathematical education in recent years. The intuitive rule of More A-More B is often reflected in students' responses to comparison tasks. In such tasks, students are asked to compare 2 objects that differ in a certain salient quantity A (where A[subscript 1] >…

Prior work showed that infants look longer at impossible figures than possible ones, although it is unclear whether they or older children understand "impossibility." We employed a series of matching and sorting tasks with pictures and objects to evaluate children's knowledge of this dimension. In Experiment 1, nearly all children…

Effective intraverbal responding often requires control by multiple elements of a verbal stimulus. The purpose of this study was to examine the emergence of such intraverbal relations following tact instruction with compound stimuli and to analyze any resulting error patterns. Participants were seven typically developing children between 3 and…

Units of measure are critical in many scientific fields. While instructors often note that students struggle with units, little research has been conducted about the nature and extent of these difficulties or why they exist. We investigated calculus students' unit use in area and volume computations. Seventy-three percent of students gave…

Several theories suggest that actions are coded for imitation in terms of mentalistic goals, or inferences about the actor's intentions, and that these goals solve the "correspondence problem" by allowing sensory input to be translated into matching motor output. We tested this intention reading hypothesis against general process accounts of…

When drawing real scenes or copying simple geometric figures young children are highly sensitive to parallel cues and use them effectively. However, this sensitivity can break down in surprisingly simple tasks such as copying a single line where robust directional errors occur despite the presence of parallel cues. Before we can conclude that this…