Expertise studies in the medical domain often focus on either visual or cognitive aspects of expertise. As a result, characteristics of expert behaviour are often described as either cognitive or visual abilities. This study focuses on both aspects of expertise and analyses them along three overarching constructs: (1) encapsulations, (2)…

The Common Core State Standards emphasize students writing analytically in response to texts. Questions remain about the nature of instruction that develops students' text-based writing skills. In the present study, we examined the role that writing task quality plays in students' mastery of analytic text-based writing. Text-based writing tasks…

This study aims to investigate about the existence of a graphical facilitation effect on probabilistic reasoning. Measures of undergraduates' performances on problems presented in both verbal-numerical and graphical-pictorial formats have been related to visuo-spatial and numerical prerequisites, to statistical anxiety, to attitudes towards…

This article describes a part of a large scale study which helped to gain understanding of the high school mathematics teachers' belief about proof. There is obvious disconnect between general beliefs and high school teachers' conceptions about proof as central element of mathematics and mathematics education. A total of 374 mathematics teachers…

Data from 60 observations of 10 teachers and 10 each of their students showed that type/quality of teaching strategy predicted 37 percent of variance in engagement and that the more indirect the teaching strategy, the greater the students' involvement in learning tasks. Implications of these and other findings are discussed. (Author/JN)

The majority of undergraduates lack advanced reasoning patterns, which are necessary for significant achievement in college science courses. The purpose of this paper is to review the studies of various instructional practices in introductory college biology courses that claim to develop reasoning. Most of these were non-traditional,…

Describes a study of college students that investigated whether various types of visual illustrations influenced abstract concept learning when combined with audio instruction. Discusses results of analysis of variance and pretest posttest scores in relation to learning performance, attitudes toward the computer-based program, and differences in…

Theories of situated learning attempt to overcome the ill-structured nature of some domains of learning, and to use students' tendencies to construct knowledge representation on context and prior experience. Success comes when students apply abstract principles to real life. This study compares the effectiveness of two different lesson structures…

The purpose of this study was to compare traditional classification training for a set of abstract concepts with multiple-relations training consisting of inference practice and the use of a content diagram. To examine this, 200 undergraduate and graduate psychology students completed a Web-based tutorial covering the abstract concepts of a…

Twelve pupils from each of 13 middle school science classes participated in this study. Findings, among others, indicate that two of nine engagement measures (attending and generalizing), together with formal reasoning ability, were related to process skill, achievement, and retention. (JN)