Agreement has become widespread that students' peer-to-peer argumentation should play a central role in science classrooms. Coordinating evidence with claims lies at the heart of a skilled argument. Yet evidence takes numerous forms that pose different interpretational challenges. Might cognitive limitations on the part of the individual student…

Human communication relies on the ability to assess what others intend to communicate beyond what they directly say. Under classic theories of communication, a critical component of this process is the evaluation of what another person knows (epistemic reasoning) and how that knowledge will affect the value of what they communicate. For example, a…

Understanding nonliteral language requires inferencing ability and is an important but complex aspect of social interaction, involving cognitive (e.g., theory of mind, executive function) as well as language skill, areas in which many deaf individuals struggle. This study examined comprehension of metaphor and sarcasm, assessing the contributions…

Building on previous work on the civic returns of adult learning, this article examines the association between adult education, personality traits, and demands for civic participation or volunteering. Based on National Education Panel Study data, the study finds openness to be a crucial personality trait for participating in further training, as…

Students' critical thinking is often researched using quantitative tests designed to measure critical thinking. In contrast, this study qualitatively analyses group and whole-class dialogues in an interdisciplinary SSI project by focusing on students' critical thinking practices. As such, the study provides an in-depth example of an immersion…

Self-explanation is a process by which learners generate inferences about causal connections or conceptual relationships. A meta-analysis was conducted on research that investigated learning outcomes for participants who received self-explanation prompts while studying or solving problems. Our systematic search of relevant bibliographic databases…

Typical print formatting provides no information regarding the linguistic features of a text, although texts vary considerably with respect to grammatical complexity and readability. Complex texts may be particularly challenging for individuals with weak language knowledge, such as English language learners. This paper investigates the usefulness…

Research has indicated that undergraduate students struggle with conceptual understanding of confidence intervals, negatively impacting statistical literacy skills, and advocates have suggested the flipped classroom pedagogy as a potential solution. The purpose of this nonequivalent control group quasi-experimental study was to determine if a…

The natural experiment proposed in this article extracts three stories from boxes of "100 paper clips". The activity requires students to apply three lessons from inferential statistics, starting with a hypothesis test and including confidence intervals as well as tolerance intervals.

Individuals draw conclusions about possibilities from assertions that make no explicit reference to them. The model theory postulates that assertions such as disjunctions refer to possibilities. Hence, a disjunction of the sort, "A or B or both," where "A" and "B" are sensible clauses, yields mental models of an…

The study presented in this article examined the impact of two simulation-based inference activities on students' understanding of p-values in a second undergraduate statistics course. In the study, students familiar with traditional inference methods used physical and computer simulations to estimate p-values. To examine students' conceptions…

It is now widely accepted that the standard inferential toolkit used by the scientific research community--null-hypothesis significance testing (NHST)--is not fit for purpose. Yet despite the threat posed to the scientific enterprise, there is no agreement concerning alternative approaches for evidence assessment. This lack of consensus reflects…

What can eye movements reveal about reading, a complex skill ubiquitous in everyday life? Research suggests that gaze can reflect short-term comprehension for facts, but it is unknown whether it can measure long-term, deep comprehension. We tracked gaze while 147 participants read long, connected, informative texts and completed assessments of…

Network meta-analysis is a popular method to synthesize the information obtained in a systematic review of studies (e.g., randomized clinical trials) involving subsets of multiple treatments of interest. The dominant method of analysis employs within-study information on treatment contrasts and integrates this over a network of studies. One…

Response process data have the potential to provide a rich description of test-takers' thinking processes. However, retrieving insights from these data presents a challenge for educational assessments and educational data mining as they are complex and not well annotated. The present study addresses this challenge by developing a computational…