In this paper, two experiments are reported investigating the nature of the cognitive representations underlying causal conditional reasoning performance. The predictions of causal and logical interpretations of the conditional diverge sharply when inferences involving "pairs" of conditionals--such as "if P[subscript 1] then Q" and "if P[subscript…

The present study investigated the underlying reasons for difficulties faced by students when they applied the concept of inertia across varying contexts. The participants of the study included five high school students. Data obtained from interviews were interpreted from the perspectives of the coordination class and epistemological framing…

Reading difficulties are experienced by children either because they fail to decode the words and thus are unable to comprehend the text or simply fail to comprehend the text even if they are able to decode the words and read them out. Failure in word decoding results from a failure in phonological coding of written information, whereas, reading…

This study explored students' ability to evaluate their learning from a multimedia inquiry unit about the causes of global climate change. Participants were 90 sixth grade students from four science classrooms. Students were provided with a text describing the causes of climate change as well as graphs showing average global temperature changes.…

Metacognition can be described as an internal conversation that seeks to answer the questions, "how much do I really know about what I am learning" and, "how am I monitoring what I am learning?" Metacognitive regulation skills are critical to meaningful learning because they facilitate the abilities to recognize the times when…

School readiness evaluations are becoming increasingly popular, and their implementation has become compulsory in an increasing number of kindergartens and schools in Hungary. In recent years, Diagnostic System for Evaluating Development (DIFER), developed by Nagy et al. has been used extensively for the diagnostic study of four- to eight-year-old…

Three studies explored the relation between affect and production of creative divergent thinking, assessed with the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (Figural TTCT). In the first study, general, positive, and negative affect, assessed with the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS) were compared with creative production. In the second study,…

This study examined performance on transitive inference problems in children with developmental dyscalculia (DD), typically developing controls matched on IQ, working memory and reading skills, and in children with outstanding mathematical abilities. Whereas mainstream approaches currently consider DD as a domain-specific deficit, we hypothesized…

Finding out about and then understanding the forces acting on a moving object, based on a description of the change in motion of this object, is an important part of the conceptual understanding of Newton's law of motion. Using Hempel's deductive-normative model for scientific explanation, we developed a deductive explanation task (DET),…

We present a collection of analogies that are intended to help students better understand the foreign and often nuanced vocabulary of the genetics curriculum. Why is it called the "wild type"? What is the difference between a locus, a gene, and an allele? What is the functional (versus a rule-based) distinction between dominant and…

A significant problem in computational language learning is that of inferring the content of well-formedness constraints from input data. In this article, we approach the constraint induction problem as the gradual adjustment of subsymbolic constraints in a connectionist network. In particular, we develop a multi-layer feed-forward network that…

Previous research into problem solving in physics resulted in researchers introducing six epistemic games to describe the organizational structures of locally coherent resources. We present a new epistemic game--the "answer-making epistemic game"--which was identified in this paper through the analysis of interviews carried out to validate a…

Grading practices can send a powerful message to students about course expectations. A study by Henderson et al. ("American Journal of Physics" 72:164-169, 2004) in physics education has identified a misalignment between what college instructors say they value and their actual scoring of quantitative student solutions. This work identified three…

Background: The equiprobability bias is a tendency for individuals to think of probabilistic events as "equiprobable" by nature, and to judge outcomes that occur with different probabilities as equally likely. The equiprobability bias has been repeatedly found to be related to formal education in statistics, and it is claimed to be based…

We present a proposal--"The Sampling Hypothesis"--suggesting that the variability in young children's responses may be part of a rational strategy for inductive inference. In particular, we argue that young learners may be randomly sampling from the set of possible hypotheses that explain the observed data, producing different hypotheses with…