This study of 4- to 6-year-olds had 2 aims: first, to determine how lower level comprehension skills (receptive vocabulary and grammar) and verbal memory support early higher level comprehension skills (inference and literal story comprehension), and second, to establish the predictive power of these skills on subsequent reading comprehension.…

The "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States 20103) identify evidence-based argumentation as a key practice in science education. This argumentation comes in many forms, each providing a unique theoretical perspective and area of educational research. Argumentation can help model aspects of scientific culture and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate differences between readers with different levels of comprehension skill when engaging in a causal questioning activity during reading, and the varied effects on inference generation. Fourth-grade readers (n = 74) with different levels of comprehension skill read narrative texts aloud and were asked…

Individuals have difficulty changing their causal beliefs in light of contradictory evidence. We hypothesized that this difficulty arises because people facing implausible causes give greater consideration to causal alternatives, which, because of their use of a positive test strategy, leads to differential weighting of contingency evidence.…

The present study narrated the forms, factors and consequences of cheating in university examinations by UNISA Open and Distance learning students from anecdotal data. The results showed that the perpetrators mostly used crib materials on paper, ruler and calculator cover. The factors that influenced examination cheating were gender, age range and…

Experienced readers of literature are more likely than novices to identify aspects of text that are salient to literary interpretation and to construct figurative meanings and thematic inferences from literary texts. This quasi-experimental study explores the hypothesis that novice readers can be supported in constructing literary interpretations…

In spite of recent methodological developments related to quality assurance in mixed methods research, practical examples of how to implement quality criteria in designing and conducting sequential QUAN [right arrow] QUAL mixed methods studies to ensure the process is systematic and rigorous remain scarce. This article discusses a three-step…

The potential utility of a distinction between "automatic (or spontaneous) and implicit" versus "controlled and explicit" processes in theory of mind (ToM) is undercut by the fact that the terms can be employed to describe different but related distinctions within cognitive systems serving that function. These include distinctions in the…

Children are judicious social learners. They may be particularly sensitive to communicative actions done pedagogically for their benefit, as such actions may mark important, generalizable information. Three experiments (N = 224) found striking differences in preschoolers' inductive generalization and exploration of a novel functional property,…

The 1999 "Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing" defines validity as the degree to which evidence and theory support the interpretations of test scores entailed by proposed uses of tests. Although quite explicit, there are ways in which this definition lacks precision, consistency, and clarity. The history of validity has taught us…

Understanding scientific phenomena requires comprehension and application of the underlying causal relationships that describe those phenomena (Carey 2002). The current study examined the roles of self-explanation and meta-level feedback for understanding causal relationships described in a causal diagram. In this study, 63 Korean high-school…

Issues with correlation attenuation due to measurement error are well documented. More than a century ago, Spearman proposed a correction for attenuation. However, this correction has seen very little use since it can potentially inflate the true correlation beyond one. In addition, very little confidence interval (CI) research has been done for…

Preschoolers participated in a modified version of the disambiguation task, designed to test whether the pragmatic environment generated by a reliable or unreliable speaker affected how children interpreted novel labels. Two objects were visible to children, while a third was only visible to the speaker (a fact known by the child). Manipulating…

Education research changed significantly with the passage of the Education Science Reform Act of 2002. That legislation created the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) within the U.S. Department of Education, forever changing research in education broadly writ, including school psychology. The creation of IES served many purposes, from defining…

Syllogisms are arguments about the properties of entities. They consist of 2 premises and a conclusion, which can each be in 1 of 4 "moods": "All A are B," "Some A are B," "No A are B," and "Some A are not B." Their logical analysis began with Aristotle, and their psychological investigation began over 100 years ago. This article outlines the…