The research reported here examined factors that influence student tertiary level chemistry enrolment choices. Students enrolled in a first-year chemistry class were surveyed, using the Chemistry Attitudes and Experiences Questionnaire (CAEQ), three times throughout their academic year: at the start of the year (n=126), the end of the first…

This article is based on research with a group of one-year Postgraduate Certificate in Education secondary trainee teachers during their initial teacher education and training in England. It considers tensions between trainees' prior experiences and conceptions of teaching and their training programme. In doing so, it seeks to examine how a…

This article presents a checklist that teachers and other education professionals can use when deciding which instructional materials to include in their content area instruction. The checklist addresses several considerations, such as the learners' prior knowledge, vocabulary levels, and motivation. In addition, characteristics of the text…

Visual representations are essential for communicating ideas in the science classroom; however, the design of such representations is not always beneficial for learners. This paper presents instructional design considerations providing empirical evidence and integrating theoretical concepts related to cognitive load. Learners have a limited…

Plausibility has been implicated as playing a critical role in many cognitive phenomena from comprehension to problem solving. Yet, across cognitive science, plausibility is usually treated as an operationalized variable or metric rather than being explained or studied in itself. This article describes a new cognitive model of plausibility, the…

Three experiments with paired comparisons were conducted to test the noncompensatory character of the recognition heuristic (D. G. Goldstein & G. Gigerenzer, 2002) in judgment and decision making. Recognition and knowledge about the recognized alternative were manipulated. In Experiment 1, participants were presented pairs of animal names where…

This study explored the relations between 5- and 6-year-olds' (N = 40) past social experiences, social knowledge, and interpretation and recall of social situations. Children were read stories depicting a fictional child's behaviors, and path analyses related children's impressions of the story character and story recall to their expectations…

Excerpted from Sarama and Clements's chapter in NAEYC's book K Today: Teaching and Learning in the Kindergarten Year, the authors explain that in response to the need for high-quality early childhood mathematics instruction, the field has developed research-based content standards identifying key concepts and skills children need to gain…

This article investigates verb placement, especially Verb second (V2), in post-puberty second language (L2) learners of two closely related Germanic V2 languages: Swedish and German. Hakansson, "et al." (2002) have adduced data from first language (L1) Swedish-speaking learners of German in support of the claim that the syntactic property of V2…

This study sought to determine the effects of prior knowledge on the achievement of undergraduates in an economics course at the Open University of the Netherlands (OuN). A total of 49 law and 39 economics students were given 4 instruments to test prior knowledge of economics, presented with a learning unit from the course "Economics and…

A study investigated the contributions of phonemic knowledge, prior knowledge, and listening comprehension to the reading comprehension of elementary age children. Three theoretical perspectives were followed aiming to specify developmental characteristics of these variables to reading comprehension: (1) contributions of prior knowledge should…

One fifth grade student, Martha, was encouraged to develop her informal ratio and proportion strategies during a 6-month teaching experiment. The challenges Martha faced during the teaching experiment are described. The current study supports the claim made by Kaput and West (1994) that initial instruction on ratio and proportion based on…

A study investigated the role of prior knowledge in ambiguous text interpretation by directly measuring readers' knowledge of, and level of involvement with, three distinct topical domains that could be assigned during reading of an ambiguous passage. Subjects, 52 athletes of average or above average reading ability competing in one of three…

A study examined the extent to which common knowledge structures and the presence of common performance components are important factors in reasoning. The eye fixations of 37 college students were recorded as they solved four types of complex inductive reasoning tasks: (1) verbal analogies, (2) figural analogies, (3) verbal series completions, and…

A study was conducted to investigate the effects of high and low relevant text underlining and annotating (making margin notes or other marks to indicate important material) on test performance. The subjects, 67 college freshmen, were randomly assigned to one of four experimenter-generated conditions: (1) high relevant underlining; (2) high…