Young children have an impressive amount of mathematics knowledge, but past psychological research has focused primarily on their number knowledge. Preschoolers also spontaneously engage in a form of early algebraic thinking-patterning. In the current study, we assessed 4-year-old children's knowledge of repeating patterns on two occasions…

The order of problems presented to students is an important variable that affects learning effectiveness. Previous studies have shown that solving problems in a blocked order, in which all problems of one type are completed before the student is switched to the next problem type, results in less effective performance than does solving the problems…

In this article we report two studies: a detailed longitudinal analysis of errors in "wh"-questions from six German-learning children (age 2 ; 0-3 ; 0) and an analysis of the prosodic characteristics of "wh"-questions in German child-directed speech. The results of the first study demonstrate that German-learning children…

Adults with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have shown deficits in switching between rules governing their behaviour, as have high-functioning children with ASD. However, there are few studies of flexibility in lower-functioning children with ASD. The current study investigated this phenomenon with a group of low-functioning children with ASD…

The study of language production by adults who are learning a second language (L2) has received a good deal of attention especially when it comes to omission of inflectional morphemes within L2 utterances. Several explanations have been proposed for these inflectional errors. One explanation is that the L2 learner simply does not have the L2…

This study compares Spanish morphosyntax error types and magnitude in monolingual Spanish and Spanish-English bilingual children with typical language development (TD) and language impairment (LI). Performance across groups was compared using cloze tasks that targeted articles, clitics, subjunctives, and derivational morphemes in 57 children.…

Learning algebra is difficult for many students in part because of an emphasis on the memorization of abstract rules. Algebraic reasoners across expertise levels often rely on perceptual-motor strategies to make these rules meaningful and memorable. However, in many cases, rules are provided as patterns to be memorized verbally, with little overt…

This descriptive study determined which of the sources of errors would predict the errors committed by novice Java programmers. Descriptive statistics revealed that the respondents perceived that they committed the identified eighteen errors infrequently. Thought error was perceived to be the main source of error during the laboratory programming…

In a provocative and influential paper, Jesse Rothstein (2010) finds that standard value-added models (VAMs) suggest implausible future teacher effects on past student achievement, a finding that obviously cannot be viewed as causal. This is the basis of a falsification test (the Rothstein falsification test) that appears to indicate bias in VAM…

Neuroscience suggests that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is responsible for conflict monitoring and the detection of errors in cognitive tasks, thereby contributing to the implementation of attentional control. Though individual differences in frontally mediated goal maintenance have clearly been shown to influence outward behavior in…

Inhibitory control and incentive processes underlie decision making, yet few studies have explicitly examined their interaction across development. Here, the effects of potential rewards and losses on inhibitory control in 64 adolescents (13- to 17-year-olds) and 42 young adults (18- to 29-year-olds) were examined using an incentivized antisaccade…

Human motor behaviour is continually modified on the basis of errors between desired and actual movement outcomes. It is emerging that the role played by the primary motor cortex (M1) in this process is contingent upon a variety of factors, including the nature of the task being performed, and the stage of learning. Here we used repetitive TMS to…

Caffeine has become the most prevalently consumed psychostimulant in the world, but its influences on daily real-world functioning are relatively unknown. The present work investigated the effects of caffeine (0 mg, 100 mg, 200 mg, 400 mg) on a commonplace language task that required readers to identify and correct 4 error types in extended…

The conflict monitoring account posits that globally high levels of conflict trigger engagement of top-down control; however, recent findings point to the mercurial nature of top-down control in high conflict contexts. The current study examined the potential moderating effect of associative learning on conflict-triggered top-down control…

This paper explores the methodology and application of an assessment philosophy known as standards-based grading, via a critical comparison of standards-based grading to other assessment philosophies commonly employed at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels of education. Evidenced by examples of increased student engagement and…