One special difficulty in teaching world geography is overcoming the scale differential between individual students' direct experiences and the immense size and complexity of the world. An innovative framework of operational principles, or maxims, has been suggested, and an application of the framework is described. Students search out examples in…

Mayer's SOI theory suggests that supplements added to designed environments can promote learners' knowledge construction and that different types of supplements will serve different purposes in knowledge construction. Some adjuncts can facilitate selection. Other adjuncts, such as diagrams, might facilitate the organization of important…

The purpose of this article is to provide teachers with examples of how to perform effective think-alouds. Twelve think-alouds are described. A rationale for their use in kindergarten through grade 5 is also included. In addition, this article was designed to provide teachers with lessons and activities to assist students in developing the ability…

Recently, the importance of an everyday context in physics learning, teaching, and problem-solving has been emphasized. However, do students or physics educators really want to learn or teach physics problem-solving in an everyday context? Are there not any obstructive factors to be considered in solving the everyday context physics problems? To…

This experimental study explores how 60 primary-age children's (9-11 years old) understanding of rocks was effected by instruction that used the conceptual structure of the rock cycle together with the analogy of aluminium can recycling. Using a combination of probes into children's understanding, including concept maps and semi-structured…

A diagnostic model for large-scale assessment was applied to TIMSS data to compare mathematics performance of eighth graders from three countries--the US, Singapore, and Israel. Compared were attribute mastery probabilities for content, skills and cognitive processes underlying students' performance on the 1999 TIMSS-R mathematics test. Also…

This study examined relationships between mathematical learning difficulties (MLD) and the planning, attention, simultaneous, successive (PASS) theory of cognitive processing. PASS processes were assessed in 267 Dutch students with MLD. Results indicated students with MLD performed lower than peers on all "Cognitive Assessment System"…

The present investigation examined implicit and explicit memory in 20 children diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD) and 20 matched controls. Consistent with previous research, children with AD/HD performed more poorly than controls on an explicit test of long-term memory for pictures. New results were that (a) there was…

The development of the "inversion" effect in face processing was examined in infants 3 to 6 months of age by testing their integration of the internal and external features of upright and inverted faces using a variation of the "switch" visual habituation paradigm. When combined with previous findings showing that 7-month-olds use integrative…

This paper suggests that some neuroscience concepts particularly concerned with brain pathways in trauma and fear, as well as the neurobiology of emotion, provide an additional vertex to the psychoanalytic understanding of patients' material. The role of the body has been neglected in psychoanalytic thought and formulations in favour of purely…

Adolescence is a time of considerable development at the level of behaviour, cognition and the brain. This article reviews histological and brain imaging studies that have demonstrated specific changes in neural architecture during puberty and adolescence, outlining trajectories of grey and white matter development. The implications of brain…

Background: Recent investigations suggest that experience plays an important role in the development of face processing. The aim of this study was to investigate the potential role of experience in the development of the ability to process facial expressions of emotion. Method: We examined the potential role of experience indirectly by…

Three- and 4-year-old children were tested using videos of puppets in various versions of a theory of mind change-of-location situation, in order to answer several questions about what children are doing when they pass false belief tests. To investigate whether children were guessing or confidently choosing their answer to the test question, a…

The purpose of this research was to develop and validate a new instrument, the "Mental State in Learning Environment Questionnaire" (MSLEQ), to assess student's mental state in a given learning environment. The MSLEQ has high internal consistency reliability values between 0.70-0.92 as well as good construct validity and predictive validity. After…

Recent research literature in science education, science curriculum documents, and science methods texts have been highly influenced by constructivist views of how students learn science. But the widespread and often uncritical acceptance of constructivism in science education does not reflect the heated debate between constructivists and…