Three experiments investigated children's understanding of inference as a knowledge source. Most 4- to 6-year-olds did not rate a puppet as more certain of a toy's color after the puppet looked at the toy or inferred its color than they did after the puppet guessed the color. Most 8- and 9-year-olds distinguished inference and looking from…

In this paper, we explore Peirce's work for insights into a theory of learning and cognition for education. Our focus for this exploration is Peirce's paper The "Fixation of Belief" (FOB), originally published in 1877 in "Popular Science Monthly". We begin by examining Peirce's assertion that the study of logic is essential for understanding…

A paradox seems to exist where a child, of compulsory schooling age, is excluded from a school. The practice of exclusion has evolved over the almost two centuries of compulsory schooling. Abolition of corporal punishment in Western Australia and elsewhere has tended to focus attention on exclusion and the grounds justifying such action by school…

Teachers who endeavor to build tolerant attitudes in their students often fall into the trap of political correctness. Political correctness can suspend free reflection on the differences inherent in otherness, which is the subject of tolerance, and creates an ideology of the generalized, abstract Other. As a result, teachers prefer to talk about…

This study had two aims. The first was to test the postulate of analogical equivalents in number processing using a stimulus set based on the differences between pairs of numbers, and second, to look for IQ-dependent differences in this processing. Participants were asked to make judgments concerning the differences between pairs of numbers--each…

This article explores ways of characterizing different dimensions and levels of scientific reasoning in early elementary school children, in the context of open explorations. The article focuses on children's performance on three probes which involve using evidence to generate and evaluate knowledge claims. A number of dimensions have been used to…

Building models to describe processes forms an essential part of molecular biology research. However, in molecular biology curricula little attention is generally being paid to the development of this skill. In order to provide students the opportunity to improve their model building skills, we decided to develop a number of digital cases about…

In recent years, two "paradoxes" have emerged in the "seller's market" of Chinese higher education. One is a strong demand for buying educational services and a weak demand for consumption; a second is the coexistence of an entry to the seller's market and an exit point from the buyer's market. These two "paradoxes"…

According to a recent account of infants' acquisition of their physical knowledge, the incremental-knowledge account, infants form distinct event categories, such as occlusion, containment, support, and collision events. In each category, infants identify one or more vectors which correspond to distinct problems that must be solved. For each…

The CAGE is a commonly used alcohol screening instrument. Although considerable work has been done on the validity of CAGE scores, relatively little information is available on their reliability. Reliability induction and generalization studies were performed for the CAGE. Of the 259 studies available for analysis, only 19 (7.3%) contained…

Secondary school chemical education has a problem: namely, the seeming irrelevance to the pupils of chemistry. Chemical education prepares pupils for participation in society. Therefore, it must imply a model of society, of chemistry, and of the relation between them. In this article it is hypothesized that logical positivism currently offers this…

Analogical reasoning has long been believed to play a central role in mathematics learning and problem solving (see Genter, Holyoak, & Kokinov, 2001); however, little is known about how analogy is used in everyday instructional contexts. This article examines analogies produced in naturally occurring U.S. mathematics lessons to explore…

This study estimated the independent effects of age and schooling in grades 7-9 on scores obtained on invalid conditional and class syllogisms. The results, which point to a negative, albeit small, effect of out-of-school experience and to a sizeable positive effect of schooling, replicate previous findings in a different age range and support the…

In Study 1, 10-, 13-, and 16-year-olds were assigned to conditions in which they were instructed to think logically and provided alternative antecedents to the consequents of conditional statements. Providing alternatives improved reasoning on two uncertain logical forms, but decreased logical responding on two certain forms; logic instructions…

Research on deductive reasoning in adolescents and adults has shown that errors in deductive logic are not necessarily due to a lack of logical ability but can stem from an executive failure to inhibit biases. Few studies have examined this dissociation in children. Here, we used a negative priming paradigm with 64 children (8-10 years old) to…