Too many educators avoid using data when making decisions because they believe it is too time-consuming to do so. The authors present five steps that make it easier to use data in making school decisions. The first step is to review school improvement plan to identify the most salient issues a school wants to improve. The second step is to…

Case studies are an effective way to help students understand how science works, and perhaps even more importantly, how science knowledge is constructed. Yet often when we teach the content of science, we overlook the nature of science (NOS), and in particular, how knowledge claims of science are justified (Abd-El-Khalick, Bell, and Lederman 1998;…

Psychologists have discovered a phenomenon called "Belief Bias" in which subjects rate the strength of arguments based on the believability of the conclusions. This paper reports the results of a small qualitative pilot study of undergraduate students who had previously taken an algebra-based introduction to statistics class. The subjects in this…

We describe the nature of the evidential system in Tibetan and consider the challenges that any evidential system presents to language acquisition. We present data from Tibetan-speaking children that shed light on their understanding of the syntactic and semantic properties of evidentials, and their competence in the point-of-view shift required…

Motivation to transfer is essential for the transfer of training. Without motivation, newly acquired knowledge and skills will not be applied at work. The purpose of this integrative literature review is to summarize, critique, and synthesize past transfer motivation research and to offer directions for future investigations. First, seven…

Purpose: This study was designed to replicate and extend a previous study of inferencing in which some adults with right hemisphere damage (RHD) generated but did not maintain predictive inferences over time (M. Lehman-Blake & C. Tompkins, 2001). Two hypotheses were tested: (a) inferences were deactivated, and (b) selection of previously generated…

This paper looks at the need for a better understanding of the impediments to critical thinking in relation to graduate student work. The paper argues that a distinction is needed between two vectors that influence student writing: (1) the word-level-sentence-level vector; and (2) the grammar-inferencing vector. It is suggested that much of the…

In research on learning, one of the fundamental questions concerns issues of language and thought. A number of empirical studies have revealed the interplay between understanding of subject matter and meanings of language expressions to be more dynamic and ambiguous than is commonly acknowledged. The aim of this article is to outline an…

This article describes two studies. The first study was designed to investigate the ways in which the statutory assessments of reading for 11-year-old children in England assess inferential abilities. The second study was designed to investigate the levels of performance achieved in these tests in 2001 and 2002 by 11-year-old children attending…

In this article, the authors focus on hypothesis testing--that peculiarly statistical way of deciding things. Statistical methods for testing hypotheses were developed in the 1920s and 1930s by some of the most famous statisticians, in particular Ronald Fisher, Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson, who laid the foundations of almost all modern methods of…

According to one theory about how children learn the meaning of the words for the positive integers, they first learn that "one," "two," and "three" stand for appropriately sized sets. They then conclude by inductive inference that the next numeral in the count sequence denotes the size of sets containing one more object than the size denoted by…

Researchers describe the need for students to have multiple opportunities and social interaction to learn about the differences between observation and inference and their role in developing scientific explanations (Harlen 2001; Simpson 2000). Helping children develop their skills of observation and inference in science while emphasizing the…

Observers were presented with pairs of objects varying along binary-valued attributes and learned to predict which member of each pair had a greater value on a continuously varying criterion variable. The predictions from exemplar models of categorization were contrasted with classic alternative models, including generalized versions of a…

A label can efficiently convey nonobvious information about category membership, but this information can sometimes conflict with one's own expectations. Two studies explored whether 24-month-olds (N = 56) would be willing to accept a category label indicating that an animal (Study 1) or artifact (Study 2) that looked like a member of one familiar…

This study investigates whether readers can generate predictive inferences that remain available to guide comprehension after a number of intervening sentences. The nature of the inference (detailed versus general) was also examined. In four experiments, participants read stories that suggested an inference. Reading time was measured to target…