Many mathematics teachers struggle to support their students' developing understanding of proof as an essential element in investigations of mathematics. The area of mathematics where the development of an understanding of proof is most challenging is algebra. In the case of algebraic proof, analysis of student written work on tasks that demand…

Comprehension strategy instruction has been widely studied in the past 10 years. We now know that students who actively engage and interact with text using particular cognitive strategies are more likely to understand and remember more of what they have read. Students who use these strategies are able to access knowledge that is outside the realm…

Data from 2 studies show students differ in terms of how attribute framing alters perceptions and reactions in a decision-making episode. Using student GPA as a moderator, results from a role-play-decision-making exercise (Experiment 1) show perceptions and intended actions of higher GPA students were more strongly affected by attribute framing…

As television ads have become the primary tool of communication in American campaigns, research on campaign effects has focused more and more attention on how these ads influence the electorate. Little attention has been paid, however, to the visual content of these ads. Despite a format that delivers an enormous quantity of visual information,…

This research investigated whether people are more likely to attribute events to external agents when events are negative rather than neutral or positive. Participants more often believed that ultimatum game partners were humans rather than computers when the partners offered unusually unfavorable divisions than unusually favorable divisions…

This set of studies examined the ability of 3-year-olds to conceptualize multiple pretend identities with objects. Rather than relying on verbal response measures, as has been done in the past, children's creative and inferential pretend actions were used as indicators of their understanding. The common structure to all four studies was that…

Association models constitute an attractive alternative to the usual log-linear models for modeling the dependence between classification variables. They impose special structure on the underlying association by assigning scores on the levels of each classification variable, which can be fixed or parametric. Under the general row-column (RC)…

Many kinds of common and easily observed causal relations exhibit property transmission, which is a tendency for the causal object to impose its own properties on the effect object. It is proposed that property transmission becomes a general and readily available hypothesis used to make interpretations and judgments about causal questions under…

Inexact measurements can have devastating effects in sciences where precision is of paramount importance. In contrast, morphological sciences rely heavily on description, comparison, and estimation to make meaningful inferences about the structure of humans and other animals. A review of the 1918 edition of "Gray's Anatomy" shows that the tendency…

Using a representational momentum paradigm, this study investigated the hypothesis that judgments of how far another agent's head has rotated are influenced by the perceived gaze direction of the head. Participants observed a video-clip of a face rotating 60[degrees] towards them starting from the left or right profile view. The gaze direction of…

Many studies have established that children tend to exclude objects for which they already have a name as potential referents of novel words. In the current study we asked whether this exclusion can be triggered by social-pragmatic context alone without pre-existing words as blockers. Two-year-old children watched an adult looking at a novel…

The voice is a marker of a person's identity which allows individual recognition even if the person is not in sight. Listening to a voice also affords inferences about the speaker's emotional state. Both these types of personal information are encoded in characteristic acoustic feature patterns analyzed within the auditory cortex. In the present…

L. Wilkinson and the Task Force on Statistical Inference (1999) recommended reporting confidence intervals for measures of effect sizes. If the sample size is too small, the confidence interval may be too wide to provide meaningful information. Recently, K. Kelley and J. R. Rausch (2006) used an iterative approach to computer-generate tables of…

When children hear an object referred to with a label that is moderately discrepant from its appearance, they frequently make inferences about that object consistent with the label rather than its appearance. We asked whether 3-year-olds actually believe these unexpected labels (i.e., conversion) or whether their inferences simply reflect a desire…

Data literacy is recognized as a critically important skill in today's society, but thinking with and about data is often ignored in K-12 curricula. The Thinking With Data (TWD) project advocates that data literacy is a skill that should be addressed in an interdisciplinary manner. This article provides an overview of the TWD curriculum for middle…