In a highly systematic literature, researchers have investigated the manner in which people make feature inferences in paradigms involving uncertain categorizations (e.g., Griffiths, Hayes, & Newell, 2012; Murphy & Ross, 1994, 2007, 2010a). Although researchers have discussed the implications of the results for models of categorization and…

The goal of this exploratory study was to analyze how beginning prospective secondary school teachers approached the analysis of student written responses to formative assessment probes. We sought to identify what elements of students' written work were noticed, what types of inferences of student understanding were built, and what these noticed…

Recently, Stephen Gorard has outlined strong objections to the use of significance testing in social research. He has argued, first, that as the samples used in social research are almost always non-random it is not possible to use inferential statistical techniques and, second, that even if a truly random sample were achieved, the logic behind…

The question of the relationship between gesture production and mental models was explored in three experiments focusing on inference making when learning from reading a scientific text. Participants engaged in one-on-one interviews after reading an illustrated tutorial on the human circulatory system. Participants gestured more frequently when…

A review of the software Just Another Gibbs Sampler (JAGS) is provided. We cover aspects related to history and development and the elements a user needs to know to get started with the program, including (a) definition of the data, (b) definition of the model, (c) compilation of the model, and (d) initialization of the model. An example using a…

By their second birthday, children have begun using grammatical cues to decipher the meaning of newly encountered words. By 3 years of age, there is evidence that children are more reliant on grammatical than social cues to decipher verb meaning (Nappa, Wessel, McEldoon, Gleitman, & Trueswell, 2009). Here, we investigate children's reliance on…

Obese children experience disadvantages in school and discrimination from their teachers. Teachers' implicit and explicit attitudes have been identified as contributing to these disadvantages. Drawing on dual process models, we investigated the nature of pre-service teachers' implicit and explicit attitudes, their motivation to respond without…

Much of our real-life decision making is bounded by uncertain information, limitations in cognitive resources, and a lack of time to allocate to the decision process. It is thought that humans overcome these limitations through "satisficing," fast but "good-enough" heuristic decision making that prioritizes some sources of…

Background: Social perception is an important skill. One assessment that is commonly used to assess social perception abilities is The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT). The only normative data available for this test are for Australian younger adults. Despite no normative data being available for British adults, the test is widely used…

The present study investigates the impact of higher order thinking enhancing techniques as two post-reading strategies on the EFL students' reasoning power as determined by their private speech production. Also, the relationship between the learners' private speech production and their reasoning power is also investigated. In so doing, the study…

The majority of faculty in higher education, including secular and biblical institutions, are adjunct faculty. The literature suggests that adjunct faculty are less effective and satisfied, and have weaker organizational sense of belonging (OSB) and affective organizational commitment (AOC). Denominational affiliation (DA) and religious commitment…

In many places in "The Origin of Species", Darwin compares his own theory of Natural Selection favourably with Special Creationism which comes off as a bad second best. He does this using some version of the argument form known as "Inference to the Best Explanation". The first part of this paper is methodological. It considers Whewell's notion of…

Antibiotic resistance is typically used to justify education about evolution, as evolutionary reasoning improves our understanding of causes of resistance and possible countermeasures. It has also been promoted as a useful context for teaching natural selection, because its potency as a selection factor, in combination with the very short…

This mixed-methods study examines the reading skills and processes of early adolescent Latino English learners demonstrating below-average reading comprehension performance (N = 41, mean age = 13 years). Standardized measures were used to estimate participants' word reading and vocabulary knowledge, and interviews were conducted to examine reading…

Selection bias is a persistent, and often hidden, problem in educational research. It is the primary obstacle standing in between increasingly available large education datasets and the ability to make valid causal inferences to inform policymaking, research, and practice (Stuart, 2010). This article provides an accessible discussion on the…