Although a substantial relationship of sustained attention and reasoning was consistently found, little is known about what drives this relationship. The present study aims at revealing the underlying sources that are responsible for the relationship by means of an integrative approach combining experimental manipulation and psychometric modeling.…

A reasoning strategy is iterative when the initial conclusion suggested by a set of premises is integrated into that set of premises in order to yield additional conclusions. Previous experimental studies on game theory-based strategic games (such as the beauty contest game) observed difficulty in reasoning iteratively, which has been partly…

Current theories and models of education often argue that instruction is best administered when knowledge is situated within a context. Problem-based learning (PBL) provides an approach to education that has particularly powerful affordances for learning disciplinary content and practices by solving authentic problems within a discipline. However,…

This article presents a framework and methodology for designing learning goals targeted at what students need to know and be able to do in order to attain high levels of literacy and achievement in three disciplinary areas--literature, science, and history. For each discipline, a team of researchers, teachers, and specialists in that discipline…

Children base trait inferences about people on direct observations of behavior. In some situations, these inferences might conflict with information supplied by others. This study examined 3- to 6-year-olds' willingness to change their own trait attributions about an actor after receiving a consistent or inconsistent trait label from an authority…

Characterizing how students construct causal mechanistic explanations for chemical phenomena can provide us with important insights into the ways that students develop understanding of chemistry concepts. Here, we present two qualitative studies of undergraduate general chemistry students' reasoning about the causes of London dispersion forces in…

A pilot research was undertaken in Icelandic schools during the 2013-2014 school year, in order to explore students' technological understanding and reasoning at the ages of 11 and 13. The survey included a questionnaire regarding mechanical movement, power and thermodynamics, while the project considered the congruity between students'…

In two studies we examined the extent to which skilled and less-skilled reasoners of arguments relied on relevance relations (semantic and logical relatedness) between claims and reasons when evaluating arguments. College students, selected as having high or low analytical reasoning skill, evaluated the quality of a set of two sentence arguments…

As clinical reasoning is a fundamental competence of physicians for good clinical practices, medical academics have endeavored to teach reasoning skills to undergraduate students. However, our current understanding of student-level clinical reasoning is limited, mainly because of the lack of evaluation tools for this internal cognitive process.…

Youguang Tu is a contemporary Chinese philosopher of education. His course on philosophy of education had a significant impact on his students. This exploratory study examines how Tu designed and taught this course. Ultimately, there are two reasons why Tu's course had such a significant influence on his students. The first is that Tu used…

Background: It is important to provide early educational support for children having weak mathematical skills, in order to prevent possible later mathematical learning difficulties. Currently, there is a lack of research-based mathematical intervention programmes for teachers to use. Aim: This study investigated the impact of counting skills…

This article presents the results of a qualitative research with a group of 15 university students of social sciences on informal inferential reasoning developed in a computer environment on concepts involved in the confidence intervals. The results indicate that students developed a correct reasoning about sampling variability and visualized…

This 22-session constructivist teaching experiment set out to investigate a preschool student's number understanding relative to his subitizing activity. Subitizing, a quick apprehension of the numerosity of a small set of items, has been found to characterize perceptual and conceptual processes students rely on as their understanding of number…

Four experiments tested the idea that people distinguish between biconditional, conditional, and enabling intention conditionals by thinking about counterexamples. The experiments examined intention conditionals that contain different types of reasons for actions, such as beliefs, goals, obligations, and social norms, based on a corpus of 48…

This article reenvisions fallacies for composition classrooms by situating them within rhetorical practices. Fallacies are not formal errors in logic but rather persuasive failures in rhetoric. I argue fallacies are directly linked to successful rhetorical strategies and pose the visual organizer of the Venn diagram to demonstrate that claims can…