Context theory is a very important theory in English teaching, especially the teaching of reading. This paper first analyzes the theory of context, including the features of context and some principles in context theory. Then the paper discusses the application of context theory in English teaching of reading, including some problems met in…

This article adapts the Evidence-Based Reasoning (EBR) Framework (Brown, Furtak, Timms, Nagashima, & Wilson, this issue) to create a coding system for assessing argumentation in science classroom discourse. The instrument, "Evidence-Based Reasoning in Science Classroom Discourse", is intended to provide a means for measuring the quality of EBR in…

The practice of lesson study, a professional development model originating in Japan, aligns well with recommendations from research for teacher professional development. Lesson study is also an inductive research method that uncovers student thinking and, in parallel, grants teacher-educators the opportunity to study teachers' thinking about…

Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995) suggests that people expend cognitive effort when processing information in proportion to the cognitive effects to be gained from doing so. This theory has been used to explain how people apply their knowledge appropriately when evaluating category-based inductive arguments (Medin, Coley, Storms, &…

A substantial amount of research has been conducted in an effort to understand the impact of short-term (less than 48 hr) total sleep deprivation (SD) on outcomes in various cognitive domains. Despite this wealth of information, there has been disagreement on how these data should be interpreted, arising in part because the relative magnitude of…

Humans reason by analogy (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Gentner, 1983; 2003; Hofstadter, 2001, 2006; Pinker, 2007). Some have further argued that analogs can be scientific models (Hesse, 1966, Clement, 1989) although clearly not all analogies are models. Analogies based on mere physical similarity are not equivalent to scientific models but analogies…

Although textbooks routinely include exercises to improve critical thinking skills, the effectiveness of these exercises has not been closely examined. Additionally, the connection between critical thinking skills and formal operational thought is also relatively understudied. In the study reported here, college students completed measures of…

Pairs of students are looking at rows of pennies--laughing, talking, kidding one another about who is winning and who is making smart moves. The game, a simple game for two players, is One or Two?. The game begins with a player removing any one penny. Players then take turns, removing either a single penny or a pair of pennies from adjacent…

Development of reasoning is often depicted as involving increasing use of relational similarities and decreasing use of perceptual similarities ("the perceptual-to-relational shift"). We argue that this shift is a special case of a broader developmental trend: increasing sensitivity to the predictive accuracy of different similarity types. To test…

This study addressed one aspect of scientific reasoning, the control of variables reasoning scheme. We explored whether a short intervention aimed at accelerating this reasoning scheme by CASE lessons would improve students' ability to apply this scheme in problems related to the biology curriculum. About 120 students from grade nine were assessed…

This paper comments on Reisch's book "How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science." Overall supportive of Reisch's project and perspective, it raises certain points where the data appear inconclusive and either provides additional support or briefly explores some interpretative alternatives.

This paper has two central purposes: the first is to survey some of the more important examples of fallacious argument, and the second is to examine the frequent use of these fallacies in support of the psychological construct: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The paper divides 12 familiar fallacies into three different…

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…

The main goal for the current study was to investigate whether individual differences in domain-general thinking dispositions might affect learning from multiple-document inquiry tasks in science. Middle school students were given a set of documents and were tasked with understanding how and why recent patterns in global temperature might be…

This paper studies the determinants of college major choice using a unique "information" experiment embedded in a survey. We first ask respondents their "self" beliefs--beliefs about their own expected earnings and other major-specific outcomes conditional on various majors, their "population" beliefs--beliefs about…