Historical reasoning competencies play an important role in history education. However, valid and reliable large-scale measurement instruments to assess these competencies are scarce. This study considers two instruments for measuring students' ability to perform historical perspective taking (HPT) as a historical reasoning competency. The…

In this article we report 3 experiments demonstrating that a simple booklet containing self-explanation training, designed to focus students' attention on logical relationships within a mathematical proof, can significantly improve their proof comprehension. Experiment 1 demonstrated that students who received the training generated higher quality…

How might pre-service elementary teachers' misconceptions of proof and counterexamples influence their teaching of proof? To investigate this question, two types of interviews--task-based and scenario-based--were designed to elicit pre-service elementary teachers' (PSTs) conceptions of proof and counterexamples and how those conceptions might…

This study investigated the relational reasoning capabilities of older adolescents and young adults when the focal assessment was a verbal and more schooled measure than 1 that was figural and more novel in its configuration. To achieve this end, the verbal test of relational reasoning (vTORR) was constructed to parallel the test of relational…

Consequential reasoning relevant to moral development has not been effectively practised in elementary schools in Taiwan. The present study designed a "To Do or Not To Do" website for students to explore moral dilemma situations and exercise consequence-based moral reasoning. Effective data from 160 fifth-grade students were collected…

Hooker and colleagues addressed a paradoxical situation that can arise in the application of multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) models to educational test data. We demonstrate that this MIRT paradox is an instance of the explaining-away phenomenon in Bayesian networks, and we attempt to enhance the understanding of MIRT models by placing…

Paradoxes have played great instructive roles in many cultures. They provide an excellent paradigm for teaching concepts that require deep reflection. In this article, the authors present two different paradoxes related to the length contraction in special relativity and explain their resolution. They hope that these two Gedanken experiments and…

We have assembled a large corpus of student submissions to an automatic grading system, where the subject matter involves the translation of natural language sentences into propositional logic. Of the 2.3 million translation instances in the corpus, 286,000 (approximately 12%) are categorized as being in error. We want to understand the nature of…

The authors illustrate three basic types of reasoning used in mathematics by showing how they operate in practical and mathematical situations. The importance and function of the different types of reasoning in each situation is outlined. As a consequence the authors note that while introducing new techniques by example is good from a pedagogical…

Usage-based theory considers analogical reasoning as a cognitive process required in language development. We hypothesized that difficulties with analogical reasoning could hinder the abstraction of construction schemas, thus slowing down morphosyntactic development for children with specific language impairment (SLI). We also hypothesized, in…

Men outperform women in the Mental Rotation Test (MRT) by about one standard deviation. The present study replicated a gender belief account [Moe, A., & Pazzaglia, F. (2006). Following the instructions! Effects of gender beliefs in mental rotation. Learning and Individual Differences, 16, 369-377.] for (part of) this effect. A sample of 300…

Characterizing the modes of reasoning typically applied by students to solve different types of chemistry problems is of central importance for the design of instructional strategies that can better support their learning of specific content. Thus, the central goal of this study was to identify dominant modes of reasoning expressed by college…

The aim of this study is to analyze the moral literacy model developed by Tuana; discuss the superiorities and limitations, and constitute the theoretical conditions of a new model by utilizing previous researches and theories asserted about this subject. The model has stated that moral literacy is composed of three main components as ethics…

The mental model theory postulates that the meanings of assertions, and knowledge about their context can "modulate" the logical meaning of sentential connectives, such as "if" and "or". One known effect of modulation is to block the representation of possibilities to which a proposition refers. But, modulation should also add relational…

Research on probability judgment has traditionally emphasized that people are susceptible to biases because they rely on "variable substitution": the assessment of normative variables is replaced by assessment of heuristic, subjective variables. A recent proposal is that many of these biases may rather derive from constraints on cognitive…