In their prior research on adaptive instruction for multi-representational learning, the researchers explored various perspectives on designing visual representations and scaffolds. However, controversies and discrepancies regarding the fidelity of visual representations and self-explanation prompts have yet to be resolved. This research thus…

Spaced and interleaved practices have been identified as effective learning strategies which sometimes are conflated as a single strategy and at other times treated as distinct. Learning sessions in which studying information or practicing problems are spaced in time with rest-from-deliberate-learning periods between sessions generally result in…

Metacognitive monitoring is a significant predictor of academic achievement and is assumed to be related to language competencies. Hence, it may explain academic performance differences between native and non-native speaking students. We compared metacognitive monitoring (in terms of resolution) between native and non-native speaking fourth…

How do people use information from others to solve complex problems? Prior work has addressed this question by placing people in social learning situations where the problems they were asked to solve required varying degrees of exploration. This past work uncovered important interactions between groups' "connectivity" and the problem's…

Observers experience complex patterns of visual motion in daily life due to their own movements through space, the movement of objects, and the geometry of surfaces in the visible world. Motion information shapes behavior and brain activity beginning in infancy. And yet most prior behavioral research has focused on how children process only one…

Everyday task sequences, such as cooking, contain overarching goals (completing the meal), subgoals (prepare vegetables), and motor actions (chopping). Such tasks generally are considered hierarchical because superordinate levels (e.g., goals) affect performance at subordinate levels (e.g., subgoals and motor actions). However, there is debate as…

Background: We investigate the nature of planning the canoeing of rapids and its reasoning processes, while at the same time advancing a syncretic approach to cognitive and situative theories of learning. Building upon the work of Lucy Suchman, we examine how canoers plan to run rapids and how plans serve as resources for action. Methods: In…

This eye-tracking study examines how differences in sources' trustworthiness are used by readers to regulate and resolve conflicting scientific claims. One hundred forty-four university students were sequentially presented with two conflicting scientific claims (regarding nanotechnology) across two texts. The claims were indicated to stem from two…

Chew and Cerbin (2021) offer a fruitful way of thinking deeply about teaching economics. In this article, the author offers several ideas on how to offload parts of three of the cognitive challenges they identify to an online module that any instructor could assign to their students. Ideally, this module would be described in an economics…

Recent findings have revealed that very preterm neonates already show the typical brain responses to place of articulation changes in stop consonants, but data on their sensitivity to other types of phonetic changes remain scarce. Here, we examined the impact of 7-8 weeks of extra-uterine life on the automatic processing of syllables in 20 healthy…

Danielson's Framework for Teaching (FFT) is currently used in more than 20 states to inform teacher evaluation and professional learning. To investigate whether FFT promotes instruction that appropriately responds to the needs of students with learning disabilities, we conduct a systematic content analysis of the instructional approach emphasized…

Mind maps are often used to help readers process texts, but their effectiveness is empirically under-investigated. This study explores whether the use of mind maps presented either before or after the text can prime successful selective processing strategies related to the text topic structure. Differences in performance outcomes (i.e., memory and…

Substantial research indicates that individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have difficulties with Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities, but rarely have studies used a comprehensive battery to measure both the cognitive and affective aspects of ToM. The present study tested this ability in 24 Greek-speaking children with ASD (ages 7-14), and…

Ideally, instruction should be delivered in a way that reduces the processing of information that does not contribute to learning (extraneous load) and increases cognitive processing that contributes to learning (germane load). One way students might effectively manage extraneous load is through specific video lecture viewing strategies to control…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show atypical processing of facial expressions. Research with autistic toddlers suggests that abnormalities in processing of spatial frequencies (SFs) contribute to such differences. The current event-related-potential (ERP) study investigated differences between 10-month-old infants with high- and…