The need for cognitive closure has been found to be associated with a variety of suboptimal information processing strategies, leading to decreased creativity and rationality. This experiment tested the hypothesis that exposure to fictional short stories, as compared with exposure to nonfictional essays, will reduce need for cognitive closure. One…

Experiential learning in agricultural laboratories has been a foundational component of secondary agricultural education. While inclusion of the four stages of the experiential learning cycle can enhance student learning in laboratory settings to help students reach various goals related to scientific literacy and higher-level thinking,…

Students in 12 secondary schools in three states of Malaysia were taught to use worksheets on the chemical kinetics topic which had been pre-created using the MS Excel worksheets. After the teaching, an opinion survey of 612 Form Six students from these schools was conducted. The results showed that almost all the students felt that MS Excel…

This article introduces students to the world of digital microscopy. Looking at small objects through a digital microscope is like traveling through a foreign country for the first time. The experience is new, engaging, and exciting. A handheld digital microscope is an essential tool in a 21st century teacher's toolkit and the perfect tool to…

Active learning is one of the most efficient mechanisms for learning, according to the psychology of learning. When students act as teachers for other students, the communication is more fluent and knowledge is transferred easier than in a traditional classroom. This teaching method is referred to in the literature as reciprocal peer teaching. In…

We present a synthesis of findings from constructivist teaching experiments regarding six schemes children construct for reasoning multiplicatively and tasks to promote them. We provide a task-generating platform game, depictions of each scheme, and supporting tasks. Tasks must be distinguished from children's thinking, and learning situations…

Recent research on syllogistic reasoning suggests that the logical status (valid vs. invalid) of even difficult syllogisms can be intuitively detected via small changes in affective state (Morsanyi & Handley, 2012). In a series of 6 experiments, we replicated effects of logical status on liking ratings of difficult syllogisms (although their…

The central goal of our exploratory study was to investigate differences in college chemistry students' interactions during lab experiments with different levels of inquiry. This analysis was approached from three major analytic dimensions: (i) functional analysis; (ii) cognitive processing; and (iii) social processing. According to our results,…

The article tests the assumption that forgetting in working memory for verbal materials is caused by time-based decay, using the complex-span paradigm. Participants encoded 6 letters for serial recall; each letter was preceded and followed by a processing period comprising 4 trials of difficult visual search. Processing duration, during which…

The work from the University of Central Florida's STEM summer camp (sponsored by Workforce Central Florida) is shared. The camps targeted low-SES schools with a high percentage of students on free and reduced lunch as well as high percentages of students with. Students were given preassessments and postassessments to gauge their knowledge of and…

The equipartitioning learning trajectory (Confrey, Maloney, Nguyen, Mojica & Myers, 2009) has been hypothesized and the proficiency levels have been validated through much prior work. This study solidifies understanding of the upper level of co-splitting, which has been redefined through further clinical interview work (Corley, Confrey &…

Adolescents in the United States and their teachers face an enormous academic challenge with respect to reading comprehension. College and career readiness standards outlined in the Common Core (2012) place increased emphasis on preparing students to read increasingly complex text across a range of disciplinary content areas. At issue is how to…

Alcohol-based hand-rub sanitizers are the types of products that hospital professionals use very often. These sanitizers can be classified into two major groups: those that contain a large quantity of thickener, and thus are a gel, and those that contain a small quantity of thickener, and thus remain a liquid. In an effort to create a laboratory…

Diffusion is a fundamental phenomenon that is vital in many chemical processes such as mass transport in living cells, corrosion, and separations. We describe a simple undergraduate-level experiment based on Weiner's Method to probe diffusion in a ternary aqueous mixture of small molecular-weight molecules. As an illustration, the experiment…

The purpose of the current work is to apply several main principles of the causal explanatory approach for establishing external validity to the experimental arena. By spanning the paradigm of the experimental approach and the school of program evaluation founded by Lee Cronbach and colleagues, the authors address the question of how research…