Previous research has found that different presentations of the same concept can result in different patterns of transfer to isomorphic instances of that concept. Much of this work has framed these effects in terms of advantages and disadvantages of concreteness or abstractness. We note that mathematics is a richly structured field, with deeply…

Educational software in the form of games or so called "computer assisted intervention" for young children has become increasingly common receiving a growing interest and support. Currently there are, for instance, more than 1,000 iPad apps tagged for preschool. Thus, it has become increasingly important to empirically investigate…

In 3 experiments, we examined the effects of using concrete and/or abstract visual problem representations during instruction on students' problem-solving practice, near transfer, problem representations, and learning perceptions. In Experiments 1 and 2, novice students learned about electrical circuit analysis with an instructional program that…

Cognitive strategies are important tools for children with math difficulties (MD) in learning to solve word problems. The effectiveness of strategy training, however, depends on working memory capacity (WMC). Thus, children with MD but with relatively higher WMC are more likely to benefit from strategy training, whereas children with lower WMC may…

Efficiency was compared between three procedures for sequencing examples with minimal stimulus variation between adjacent positive and negative examples: dynamic, static, and static with maximal differences between pairs. For young children, increasing relevant feature saliency and altering a single stimulus to generate examples reduced training…

Using a forced-choice matching-to-sample procedure five factors were varied: position of phoneme; contrast between words; type of phoneme; redundant visual cue; and allophonic variation. Performance improved significantly after four days of training for all but allophonic variation. Redundant visual cue greatly improved performance during training…