Fear appeal communications are widely used by social marketers in their efforts to persuade individuals to refrain from engaging in risky behaviors. The present research shows that exposure to a fear appeal can lead to the suppression of concepts semantically related to the threat and bias attentional resources away from threat-relevant…

This article reports on forensic letters written by physicians specializing in identifying children who have experienced maltreatment. These writers face an extraordinary exigence in that they must provide an opinion as to whether a child has experienced abuse without specifically diagnosing abuse and thus crossing into a legal domain. Their…

The role of the teacher is essential for students' successful engagement in scientific inquiry practices. This study focuses on teachers' use of an 8-week chemistry curriculum that explicitly supports students in one particular inquiry practice, the construction of scientific arguments to explain phenomena in which students justify their claims…

One important literacy practice is the ability to formulate effective arguments to convince others of the validity of one's position. In this commentary, the authors discuss the literacy practices involved in formulating arguments as well as the challenges involved in helping students acquire these practices. In contrast to more traditional…

An important goal of the current reform movement in science education is to promote scientific literacy in the United States, and scientific inquiry is at its heart. However, the National Science Education Standards clearly indicate that to promote inquiry, more emphasis should be placed on "science as argument and explanation" rather than on…

This study examines three questions about the impact of collaboration during scientific argumentation. First, do groups craft better arguments than individuals? Second, to what degree do individuals adopt and internalize the arguments crafted by their group? Third, do individuals who work in groups learn more from their experiences than…

Student academic writing in higher education is a central component of language programs whose purpose is to promote advanced literacy in the target language. At this level, students are required to produce texts that are analytical-argumentative in nature. This type of genre requires writers to formulate an interpretative statement or thesis and…

The current meta-analysis study summarizes the effects of the GlobalEd Project, a web-based educational intervention of international negotiations embedded within social studies curricula, on middle and high school students' interest in social studies and negotiation self efficacy. Meta-analytic evidence supports statistically significant…

Low teacher self-efficacy is an important factor constraining the teaching of science at the elementary level. This study was designed to investigate the effectiveness of particular sources of efficacy information for enhancing the science teaching self-efficacy of practicing elementary teachers. Twelve teachers participated in an intervention…

The power of a web-based forensic science game to teach content and motivate STEM careers was tested among secondary students. More than 700 secondary school students were exposed to one of the three web-based forensic cases for approximately 60 min. Gain scores from pre-test to a delayed post-test indicated significant gains in content knowledge.…

Improving teacher effectiveness is a key strategy to ensure student readiness for college and careers and to address achievement gaps and persistent low performance. In response to the new Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (CCSS-ELA) the National Writing Project (NWP) created a professional development (PD) program to support…

This paper looks at the need for a better understanding of the impediments to critical thinking in relation to graduate student work. The paper argues that a distinction is needed between two vectors that influence student writing: (1) the word-level-sentence-level vector; and (2) the grammar-inferencing vector. It is suggested that much of the…

This article looks at the transmission of ideas in the British Enlightenment. The focus is on three individuals, Matthew Boulton, James Keir and Anna Seward, who constructed and communicated messages about industrialisation in the late eighteenth century to the public rather than through formal education. Boulton, Keir and Seward attempted to…

In this research, it is aimed to develop a scale to observe the body language which is used during an argument. A sample group of 266 teacher candidates study at the departments of Class, Turkish or Social Sciences at the Faculty of Education was used in this study. A logical and statistical approach was pursued during the development of scale. An…

This paper attempts to describe the relationship between the embodied practice of fieldwork and the written articulation of this experience. Starting from Valerie Hey's conceptualization of "rapport" as form of "intersubjective synergy", a moment of recognition of similarity within difference--similar in structure to Laclau and Moufffe's…