Context: Diagnostic reasoning is acknowledged as a vital skill for medical practice, but research regarding this core aspect of medical cognition as it pertains to athletic training contexts is scarce. To compare athletic training--specific clinical reasoning skills with those of other health care practitioners, educators need to better understand…

Passively listening to a lecture (deWinstanley & Bjork, 2002), skimming a textbook chapter, or googling for an answer to a homework problem is not conducive to deep and lasting high-order learning. At the same time, presenting complex concepts in problem-based classes might overload students' working memory capacity. Effective student learning…

Students struggle with proving, a fundamental activity in upper-level undergraduate mathematics courses. Learning how to prove is a difficult transition for students, as they shift from largely computation-based to argument-based work. In response, mathematics departments have instituted courses, introduction or transition to proof, designed to…

This case study describes the interactions between pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and practitioner inquiry as observed in a residency-model teacher preparation program. In the Math and Science Teacher Education Residency (MASTER), novice teachers engaged in iterative cycles of assessing student thinking and using that assessment to reflect on…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the use of brain-based pre-writing strategies will improve students' abilities to support claims, with evidence, on a state mandated classroom-based assessment. Specifically, the research evaluated the working hypothesis that using brain-based, pre-writing activity in the non-fiction, expository…

Building on the work of Schmidt et al., we propose a definition of curricular coherence for K-12 mathematics that encompasses both the arrangement of topics, which we call coherence of content, and the habits of mind the curriculum fosters in students, which we call coherence of practice. We give examples to illustrate each. [For the complete…

Diagrams are powerful opportunities for grappling with and learning abstract relationships, for example learning the relations between elements in an ecosystem rather than simply memorizing the objects within the system. Further, what is crucial from any diagrammatic learning opportunity is the ability to use this relational knowledge in a new…

Recent studies posit that deficits in emotion regulation may lead to increased negative emotional experience in schizophrenia. While individuals with schizophrenia evidence a number of abnormalities in emotion regulation, it is unclear whether these deficits are discrete or related; furthermore, the mechanisms underlying these deficits are not…

Cognitive development is thought to depend on the refinement and specialization of functional circuits over time, yet little is known about how this process unfolds over the course of childhood. Here we investigated growth trajectories of functional brain circuits and tested an interactive specialization model of neurocognitive development which…

In the real word, we perceive our environment as a series of static and dynamic views, with viewpoint transitions providing a natural link from one static view to the next. The current research examined if experiencing such transitions is fundamental to learning the spatial layout of small-scale displays. In Experiment 1, participants viewed a…

An ongoing question in second language vocabulary learning is how to optimize the acquisition of words. One approach is the so-called "spaced repetition technique" that uses intervals to repeat words in a given time frame (Balota et al., 2007; Leitner, 1972; Oxford, 1990; Pimsleur, 1967; Roediger & Karpicke, 2010; Schuetze &…

Starvation causes a motivational state that facilitates diverse behaviors such as feeding, walking, and search. Starved "Drosophila" can form odor/feeding-time associations but the role of starvation in encoding of "time" is poorly understood. Here we show that the extent of starvation is correlated with the fly's ability to…

Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging evidence has shown that false memories arise from higher-level conscious processing regions rather than lower-level sensory processing regions. In the present study, we assessed whether the lateral occipital complex (LOC)--a lower-level conscious shape processing region--was associated with false…

The current study describes a receiver-operating characteristic (ROC) task for human participants based on the spontaneous recognition memory paradigms typically used with rodents. Recollection was significantly higher when an object was in the same location and background as at encoding, a combination used to assess episodic-like memory in…

Sleep is thought to preferentially consolidate hippocampus-dependent memory, and as such, spatial navigation. Here, we investigated the effects of sleep on route knowledge and explicit and implicit semantic regions in a virtual environment. Sleep, compared with wakefulness, improved route knowledge and also enhanced awareness of the semantic…