Superior detection and rejection of 1 versus another class of items during recognition is called the mirror effect. Some mirror effects may involve strategic criterion adjustments based on item distinctiveness and its relation to memorability. Three experiments demonstrated mirror effects for known versus unknown scenes and 1 suggested a similar…

Ten years after the groundbreaking "From Barbie to Mortal Kombat" highlighted the ways gender stereotyping and related social and economic issues permeate digital game play, the number of women and girl gamers has risen considerably. Despite this, gender disparities remain in gaming. Women may be warriors in "World of…

This article reviews research on the Minimalist instructional design model, a learner-centred approach to the design of instructional materials such as computer program manuals or on-line help. Studies in this paradigm have typically compared minimalist materials against traditional "system-centred" materials. Additionally, some studies have…

This article describes a study into the role of heuristic support in facilitating discovery learning through simulation-based learning. The study compares the use of two such learning environments in the physics domain of collisions. In one learning environment (implicit heuristics) heuristics are only used to provide the learner with guidance…

What, if anything, do teachers need to know about how the brain works to improve teaching and learning? After all, a plumber needs to know how to stop leaks--not the molecular structure of water. And one can learn how to use a computer without knowing how a computer chip works. Likewise, teachers need to know how to help students develop…

The purpose of this study was to experimentally test the influence of computer-mediated word-of-mouth communication (WOM) on student perceptions of instructors (attractiveness and credibility) and on student attitudes toward learning course content (affective learning and state motivation). It was hypothesized that students who receive positive…

A software application called HyperStory is a reading program for short fiction which has proved to be effective in the classroom. In 3 years of use, over 300 students have tried it out. Part of the reason for its suitability for helping students develop short story reading skills lies in the relationship between the computer technology known as…

This report details the data requirements and procedures used to develop new school bus routes for Six Mile Elementary School in South Carolina. The project examined the current routes of the school and applied computer based techniques to develop new routes given the existing bus stops. Bus routes were developed so that distance and travel time…

The research question addressed in this study was: "How do the problem-solving heuristic processes used by preservice elementary teachers who are more effective problem solvers differ from those used by less effective problem solvers?" Three more- and three less-effective problem solvers performed a card sorting task designed to determine if…

This manual describes Version 4 of Soar, an architecture for problem solving and learning based on heuristic search and chunking. Version 4 is available as of January 1986 in Common Lisp, Franz-Lisp, Interlisp, and Zeta-Lisp. An introduction to the Soar system is presented, and information is provided about the following system aspects: (1) data…

The topic of teaching troubleshooting is examined as an example of the teaching of cognitive strategies for technical problem solving. The traditional behavioral approach to teaching troubleshooting has essentially been algorithmic. Recent cognitive research suggests an approach founded first on task analysis and characterized by: (1) analysis of…

As a demonstration of the application of heuristic devices to decision-theoretical techniques, an interactive computer program known as MAUD (Multiattribute Utility Decomposition) has been designed to support decision or choice problems that can be decomposed into component factors, or to act as a tool for investigating the microstructure of a…

The paper presents and demonstrates a heuristic for helping students learn how to read and understand figuration in literature. The heuristic contains elements from linguistics, New Criticism, and rhetorical analysis in a recursive process which enables students to see how features of words combine into figurative patterns. Beginning at the level…

There is a growing body of evidence indicating that people often overestimate the similarity between characteristics of random samples and those of the populations from which they are drawn. This paper: reviews studies that have attempted to determine whether the basic heuristic employed in thinking about random samples is passive and descriptive…

A problem-solving method of teaching was used in the recitation sections of a freshmen chemistry course for science and engineering majors at Purdue University. The method was based on prior research which revealed that good problem solvers formed better representations and used heuristics more often than poor problem solvers. Consequently, the…