Recent reforms emphasize a shift in how students should learn and demonstrate knowledge of science. These reforms call for students to learn content knowledge using science and engineering practices, creating integrated science knowledge. While there is existing literature about the development of integrated science knowledge assessments, few…

This study explored the differential contribution of cognitive and motivational factors on the comprehension of an expository text in secondary school students. One hundred and fifty-five 7th and 8th grade students were assessed in prior knowledge, inferences, metacognition, reading motivation, topic interest, and reading comprehension of history…

Many researchers have long assumed imaginative play critical to the healthy cognitive, social, and emotional development of children, which has important implications for early-education policy and practice. But, the authors find, a careful review of the existing literature highlights a need for a better theory to clarify the nature of the…

How do human infants learn the causal dependencies between events? Evidence suggests that this remarkable feat can be achieved by observation of only a handful of examples. Many computational models have been produced to explain how infants perform causal inference without explicit teaching about statistics or the scientific method. Here, we…

The scale-invariant memory, perception, and learning (SIMPLE) model developed by Brown, Neath, and Chater (2007) formalizes the theoretical idea that scale invariance is an important organizing principle across numerous cognitive domains and has made an influential contribution to the literature dealing with modeling human memory. In the context…

An understanding of conditional probability is essential for students of inferential statistics as it is used in Null Hypothesis Tests. Conditional probability is also used in Bayes' theorem, in the interpretation of medical screening tests and in quality control procedures. This study examines the understanding of conditional probability of…

This response to the comments contains three main sections, each addressing a subset of the comments. In the first section, I will respond to the comments by Brennan, Haertel, and Moss. All of these comments suggest ways in which my presentation could be extended or improved; I generally agree with their suggestions, so my response to their…

The aim of this study is to reveal differences between attitudes and approaches of students from different types of high school and the first grade of university towards problem solving in chemistry. For this purpose, the scale originally developed by Mason and Singh (2010) to measure students' attitude and approaches towards problem solving in…

The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of a newly developed modules, Interactive Web-Based Visualization Tools for Gluing Undergraduate Fuel Cell Systems Courses system (IGLU), on learning motivations of engineering students using two samples (n[subscript 1] = 144 and n[subscript 2] = 135) from senior engineering classes. The…

Missing data is endemic in much educational research. However, practices such as step-wise regression common in the educational research literature have been shown to be dangerous when significant data are missing, and multiple imputation (MI) is generally recommended by statisticians. In this paper, we provide a review of these advances and their…

(Purpose) The purpose of this paper is to describe visual literacy and an adapted version of Visual Thinking Strategy (VTS) and its value to enhance students' inferential thinking. (Methodology) An example of a middle school VTS, art-integrated lesson is described as well as reflections of a middle school language arts teacher about what she…

Billions of people interact with Web search engines daily and their interactions provide valuable clues about their interests and preferences. While modeling search behavior, such as queries and clicks on results, has been found to be effective for various Web search applications, the effectiveness of the existing approaches are limited by…

A growing literature suggests that generating and evaluating explanations is a key mechanism for learning and inference, but little is known about how children generate and select competing explanations. This study investigates whether young children prefer explanations that are simple, where simplicity is quantified as the number of causes…

The scoring process is critical in the validation of tests that rely on constructed responses. Documenting that readers carry out the scoring in ways consistent with the construct and measurement goals is an important aspect of score validity. In this article, rater cognition is approached as a source of support for a validity argument for scores…

In making causal inferences, children must both identify a causal problem and selectively attend to meaningful evidence. Four experiments demonstrate that verbally framing an event ("Which animals make Lion laugh?") helps 4-year-olds extract evidence from a complex scene to make accurate causal inferences. Whereas framing was unnecessary when…