During practical science Sc1 experiments, some children find making predictions very difficult. The use of scenarios seems to be an excellent way of encouraging children to think creatively about what might happen and focus their attention on what they should experience. If children use carefully selected and explained data, it can help them to…

Experimental physics is seen as an essential part of tertiary physics education. Students are supposed to develop practical skills and advance from closed "cookbook" experiments to open experiment and design experiment procedures independently. As a consequence tertiary practical physics courses increase in the level of challenge…

Teaching how to implement an authentic inquiry is one of the most enduring claims for better teaching method in science classrooms, and for teachers it remains as a practical matter of classroom lessons. The practical matter is that teachers might want students to get involved in their own inquiry on the one hand, and one the other hand teachers…

Breaching experiments involve the conscious exhibition of "unexpected" behavior, an observation of the types of social reactions such behavioral violations engender, and an analysis of the social structure that makes these social reactions possible. The conscious violation of norms can be highly fruitful for sociology students, providing insights…

Protege selection was examined in a laboratory experiment and a field study of experienced mentors. The results from both studies indicated that protege willingness to learn was a critical component of protege selection. Results of the field study also revealed that organizational rewards for developing others related to the influence protege…

Young children's failures in reasoning about beliefs and desires, and especially about false beliefs, have been much studied. However, there are few accounts of successful belief-desire reasoning in older children or adults. An exception to this is a model in which belief attribution is treated as a process wherein an inhibitory system selects the…

The trend toward inquiry-based learning is providing today's students with a more enriching education. When implementing inquiry it is important to recognize the great number of safety concerns that accompany this paradigm shift. Fortunately, with some consideration, teachers can shape students' laboratory experiments into safe and valuable…

Two experiments investigated the effect of achievement goals on the transfer of a problem-solving strategy in 7- and 11-year-old children. In the first experiment, motivational priming took place before the learning of the strategy, affecting the learning as well as the transfer of the strategy. In the second experiment, motivational priming took…

Consistent with social agency theory, we hypothesized that learners who studied a set of worked-out examples involving proportional reasoning narrated by an animated agent with a human voice would perform better on near and far transfer tests and rate the speaker more positively compared to learners who studied the same set of examples narrated by…

The impact of differences in maternal self-efficacy and infant difficulty on mothers' sensitivity to small changes in the fundamental frequency of an audiotaped infant's cry was explored in 2 experiments. The experiments share in common experimental manipulations of infant difficulty, a laboratory derived measure of maternal efficacy (low,…

These series of lessons uses the process of student inquiry to teach the concepts of force and motion identified in the National Science Education Standards for grades 5-8. The lesson plan also uses technology as a teaching tool through the use of interactive Web sites. The lessons are built on the 5-E format and feature imbedded assessments.

The experiments reported here were concerned with the development of delayed self-recognition. Children were videotaped playing a game and were marked covertly with a sticker on their forehead while doing so. The findings, of both a cross-sectional sample and a prospective longitudinal one, revealed that 3- but not 2.5-year-old children reached to…

Previous research has shown that young children have difficulty searching for a hidden object whose location depends on the position of a partly visible physical barrier. Across four experiments, we tested whether children's search errors are affected by two variables that influence adults' object-directed attention: object boundaries and…

The question regarding visual imagery and visual perception remain an open issue. Many studies have tried to understand if the two processes share the same mechanisms or if they are independent, using different neural substrates. Most research has been directed towards the need of activation of primary visual areas during imagery. Here we review…

Three experiments explored the effect of affectively congruent or incongruent primes on evaluation responses to positive or negative valenced targets (the "affective priming" effect). Experiment 1 replicated the basic affective priming effect with Spanish nouns: reaction time for evaluative responses (pleasant/unpleasant) were slower on…