International students encounter challenges while transitioning into a new environment with unfamiliar academic and social expectations. The situation is especially complicated for international dual-diploma students, who complete certain parts of their undergraduate education in their home and host countries. Challenges faced in communication in…

When reading scientific information on the Internet laypersons frequently encounter conflicting claims. However, they usually lack the ability to resolve these scientific conflicts based on their own prior knowledge. This study aims to investigate how differences in the trustworthiness and/or expertise of the sources putting forward the…

Precalculus and single-variable calculus courses are a critical early juncture for the success of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students in the United States (US). The default course structure is often a required three-term sequence of precalculus, differential calculus, and integral calculus. In this paper we analyse…

The goal of the present set of experiments was to identify the conditions under which readers evoked prepotent-response inhibition to prevent interference from reactivated misconceptions. In Experiment 1, participants with varying inhibition ability read refutation texts that addressed common misconceptions and control texts. Overall, participants…

The purpose of this research was to examine college students' conceptions of learning computer science and approaches to learning computer science and to examine the relationships among these two important constructs and possible moderating factors. Student data (N = 193) were collected using the conceptions of learning computer science and the…

Decisions about participation in computer science and engineering opportunities are often made prior to high school, and these decisions are frequently mediated by prior experience, interest, and sense of fit with community. In this article, we investigate how the Digital Youth Divas, an out-of-school program for middle school girls from…

Microteaching provides a valuable setting for preservice teachers to practice teaching prior to real classroom teaching experiences, as well as allowing teacher educators to observe the strengths and weaknesses of the preservice teachers' pedagogical content knowledge. Therefore, we studied the preservice mathematics teachers' microteachings, with…

Two studies sought to replicate and extend the seductive effect of decorative pictures in expository text comprehension to an e-learning environment. In the first study, undergraduate students read and answered questions about two texts, with and without decorative, irrelevant images, in an e-learning course. The presence of decorative images had…

Research has shown that differences in the prior knowledge of the participants and in the learning indexes adopted can explain why some studies show positive learning effects of analogy enriched text while others do not. In the present studies, these two factors were combined into one through the construction of a learning index that measured…

The purpose of this study was to examine talented/gifted students' choices of college majors and what factors most likely affected their decision. By utilizing a data collecting technique called Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) or data mining, we identified and collected data pertaining to 109 talented/gifted students with perfect SAT and/or…

Arrows are recognized as efficient visual elements in conveying location, direction, connection, and process because the shape is thought to have an immediate, common sense impact on viewers. However, the results of our prior quantitative study did not support the assumed effects of arrows in reading energy pyramid diagrams. The current study…

Information literacy, the concept most associated with inculcating the attributes necessary to behave in a strategic, thoughtful and ethical manner in the face of a superfluity of information, has been part of the information specialist scene for many years. As the United Kingdom's QAA benchmark statements for Politics and International Relations…

Children and adults often have difficulties comparing decimal magnitudes. Although individuals attempt to reconcile decimals with prior whole-number and fraction knowledge, conceptual and procedural differences between decimals and prior knowledge of whole numbers and fractions can lead to incorrect strategies. The dynamic strategy choice account…

Preservice teachers face the challenge of integrating multiple types of knowledge, such as pedagogical-psychological knowledge and subject-specific pedagogical knowledge. We investigated whether prior instruction emphasizing the importance of knowledge integration (relevance instruction) supports preservice teachers in using both knowledge types…

In everyday life, people encounter smaller rewards with higher probability than larger rewards. Do people expect this reward--probability regularity to hold in experimental settings? To answer this question, we tested whether people's behavior in probability judgment tasks is affected by the correlation between reward size and reward…