Children's trade books about science may be playing an increasing role in science instruction; however, the potential effects on student learning are unknown. To investigate whether a subset of books would be appropriate for classroom instruction about a specific science topic (plant reproduction), a selection of children's books about plants was…

We examined the effect of 4-month-old infants' previous experience with dogs, cats, or both and their online looking behavior on their learning of the adult-defined category of "cat" in a visual familiarization task. Four-month-old infants' (N = 123) learning in the laboratory was jointly determined by whether or not they had experience…

This paper documents the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of four university professors in General Chemistry for the topic "amount of substance"; a fundamental quantity of the International System of Units (SI). The research method involved the development of a Content Representation and the application of Mortimer's Conceptual…

The aim of this paper is to examine the learning processes that subjects undertake when they start using gaze as computer input. A 7-day experiment with eight Japanese students was carried out to record novice users' eye movement data during typing of 110 sentences. The experiment revealed that inefficient eye movements was dramatically reduced…

This article reports a study that investigated the effects of Q-matrix misspecifications on parameter estimates and misclassification rates for the deterministic-input, noisy "and" gate (DINA) model, which is a restricted latent class model for multiple classifications of respondents that can be useful for cognitively motivated diagnostic…

When children come together to play dramatically they are involved in the creation of an improvised text. This text emerges spontaneously via the moment-by-moment contributions of individual players who must operate in a highly collaborative way in order to achieve cohesion. This paper reports on a research project involving several groups of 11-…

A model of treatment acceptability is proposed that distributes overall treatment acceptability into three separate categories of influence. The categories are comprised of societal influences, consultant influences, and influences associated with consumers of treatments. Each of these categories are defined and their inter-relationships within…

In the present article, the relevant and little-studied issue of the typology of instructors in institutions of higher learning is examined using the example of educators conducting the cycle of economic disciplines. In 2003 and 2004 a survey was conducted of the corps of instructors in fourteen higher educational institutions of four cities…

Despite the rhetoric of valuing a liberal education, many institutions are implementing a business model of education as a consequence of increasing costs and decreasing state funding. Honors programs serve as one of the isolated arenas in institutions of higher education that explicitly foster and encourage a liberal arts orientation. Based on…

Research productivity was examined across 5 highly nominated multicultural psychology journals. This yielded a ranking of 40 highly productive institutions and individuals between 1994 and 2007. The results are potentially useful in beginning to track trends in the publication of multicultural psychology studies in research journals.…

The study explores whether the naive concepts of "solid" and "liquid" persist in adolescence. Accuracy of responses and reaction times where measured while 41 ninth graders classified different solids (rigid, non-rigid and powders) and different liquids (runny, dense) into solid or liquid. The results show that these naive conceptions affect…

Three experiments explored the significance of deontic properties (involving rights and obligations) in representations of social categories. Preschool-aged children (M = 4.8), young school-aged children (M = 8.2), and adults judged the centrality of behavioral, psychological, and deontic properties for both familiar (Experiments 1 and 2, Ns = 50…

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) performance mandates, embedded within state accountability systems, focus school AYP (adequate yearly progress) compliance squarely on the percentage of students at or above proficient. The singular importance of this quantity for decision-making purposes has initiated extensive research into percent proficient as a…

Anxiety sensitivity has been implicated as a risk factor for the development and maintenance of panic and other anxiety disorders. Although researchers have generally assumed that anxiety sensitivity is a dimensional, rather than categorical, variable, recent taxometric research has raised questions concerning the accuracy of this assumption. The…

Objective: Assess how 8- to 13-year-old children categorized and labeled food items for possible use as part of a food search strategy in a computerized 24-hour dietary recall. Design: A set of 62 cards with pictures and names of food items from 18 professionally defined food groups was sorted by each child into piles of similar food items.…