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…

In the present study, the authors investigated the relationship between low blood pressure (BP) and attentional performance through the application of a multidimensional diagnostic approach. The authors compared 40 subjects with essential hypotension (mean systolic BP = 97.6 mmHg) with 40 normotensive controls (mean systolic BP = 124.1 mmHg) using…

Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is characterized by a pattern of morphological, functional, and molecular characteristics with, in at least some cases, apparent relationships among phenotypic features at different levels. Gross morphology differences in the sizes of some human brain regions are accompanied by fine structural alterations in the shapes and…

In this article the author suggests that the persistence of a "performance model" of early childhood music education has detracted attention from children's spontaneous musical activity. The article focuses on one dimension of children's spontaneous musicality: improvised singing. Descriptions of short episodes taken from two periods of…

Designing effective instruction is the goal of any instructional designer. This article discusses how lesson design can be enhanced by incorporating certain fundamentals of cognitive psychology. The stages of human information processing and a typical four-step lesson are integrated in a model that can inform instructional design. (Contains 1…

Currently there is considerable enthusiasm for exploring how we can apply digital gaming paradigms to learning. But these approaches are often weak in linking the game-playing activity to transferable social or conceptual processes and skills that constitute, or are related to, learning. In contrast, this article describes a "dialogue…

The authors studied the evolution of interindividual intentionality in children and showed that the sharing of knowledge and beliefs requires more complex operations than those involved in usual false-belief tasks. The authors conducted 3 experiments on 380 children (aged 5 years, 0 months to 9 years, 6 months). They assessed the children's…

Imaginal perspective switches are often considered to be difficult, because they call for additional cognitive transformations of object coordinates (transformation hypothesis). Recent research suggests that problems can also result from conflicts between incompatible sensorimotor and cognitive object location codes during response specification…

To set an optimal decision criterion on a test of recognition, a subject must estimate the degree to which they can discriminate previously studied from unstudied stimuli. To do so accurately, the subject must assess not only their mastery of the material but also the extent to which the distractors yield mnemonic evidence that makes them…

The paper presents the processes of entrepreneurial human capital accumulation and its impact on rural business growth. Data are derived from four surveys on rural businesses in mountainous and less favoured areas in Southern Europe. Formal pathways of entrepreneurial human capital accumulation refer to education and training, while informal…

This study examined the contribution of cognitive and emotion-based factors in predicting school-age children's risk-taking decisions when the social-situational context did, and did not, pressure for risk-taking. Using drawings of play situations that depicted three possible paths of travel that varied in injury risk and pitted convenience…

Attention acts as the mind's "gatekeeper" by regulating and prioritizing the stimuli processed by the central nervous system. It is essential for cognitive performance, memory, and behavior, and we know that even slight deficiencies in attention compromise learning. Basic neuroscience research further indicates that attention consists of (fairly)…

We first discern three different sources to describe the non-modelling-friendly environment in Taiwan: the background of mathematics teachers and students, examinations and textbooks. Under such unfriendly circumstances, how one can implement the teaching and learning of mathematical modelling is explored. In this paper, we focus on the analysis…