Spatial ability predicts success in STEM (Science, Technology, Education, and Mathematics) fields, particularly chemistry. This paper reports two studies investigating the unique contribution of mental rotation ability to spatial thinking in a STEM discipline. Using authentic disciplinary tasks from chemistry, we show that the difficulty of a…

Students try to understand many abstract concepts by using mental models they have created by thinking and imagining. Students must have a functional and dynamic atomic model in their minds in order to understand the atomic and atomic concepts. In this study; it was aimed to determine the models of science student candidates using the analogy of…

Infants' representations of physical events are surprisingly flexible. Brief exposure to one event can immediately enhance infants' representations of another event. The present experiments tested two potential mechanisms underlying this priming: enhanced encoding or improved retrieval. Five-month-olds saw a target block become hidden inside a…

This column provides background science information for elementary teachers. Many innovations with computer software begin with analysis of how humans do a task. This article takes a look at how humans recognize spoken words and explains the origins of speech-recognition software.

Several approaches to implementing symbol-like representations in neurally plausible models have been proposed. These approaches include binding through synchrony (Shastri & Ajjanagadde, 1993), "mesh" binding (van der Velde & de Kamps, 2006), and conjunctive binding (Smolensky, 1990). Recent theoretical work has suggested that…

This article by David Aldridge concerns the promise of knowledge "insertion." The promise can be elucidated as follows: knowledge could be inserted by a less time-consuming (and possibly in many senses less expensive) technological process than traditional learning, whereby, for example, some relatively swift procedure of implanting or…

The aim of this research is to introduce a method of constructing knowledge structures which represent the relationships among the knowledge items in a pedagogically useful way. A prototype, "MyTeLeMap," was implemented to support both learners and instructors. Learners could visualize the knowledge structures of different knowledge…

Discussion forums in learning management systems (LMS) have been shown to promote student interaction and contribute to the collaborative practice in the teaching-learning process. By evaluating the postings, teachers can identify students with learning difficulties. However, due to the large volume of posts that are generated on a daily basis in…

This theoretical paper introduces a new way to view and characterize learning astronomy. It describes a framework, based on results from empirical data, analyzed through standard qualitative research methodology, in which a theoretical model for a vital competency of learning astronomy is proposed: "reading the sky," a broad description…

Neuroscience can greatly benefit from using novel methods in computer science and informatics, which enable knowledge discovery in unexpected ways. Currently one of the biggest challenges in Neuroscience is to map the functional circuitry of the brain. The applications of this goal range from understanding structural reorganization of neurons to…

The study aimed to know how does mind-map software assess the representation of learners' knowledge and how brain tester software assess the performance of left, right, auditory, and visual lobes of the brain to represent information. It also aimed to study the differential effectiveness of audio, visual, and audio-visual information to represent…

Cyberlearning presents numerous challenges such as the lack of personal and assessment-driven learning, how students are often puzzled by the lack of instructor guidance and feedback, the huge volume of diverse learning materials, and the inability to zoom in from the general concepts to the more specific ones, or vice versa. Intelligent tutoring…

This study reports the effects of using word clouds to support students' knowledge integration from online inquiry as demonstrated by blog posts, tags and concept maps. Fifty-four undergraduate students from a medium-sized university in the northwestern United States were randomly assigned into two groups and blogged for five weeks. To support…

Recent research on the phenomenon of improper proportional reasoning focused on students' understanding of elementary functions and their external representations. So far, the role of basic function properties in students' concept images of functions remained unclear. We add to this research line by investigating how accurate students are in…

Although providing open learner models to teachers and learners has proven effective, building accurate learner models remains a very complex task, partly due to the large amount of data that must be analyzed. We propose a method for specifying an open learner model at the conceptual level. This model re-uses constraints or indicators already…