Higher education broadly and liberal arts institutions specifically are experiencing a range of critical challenges, not the least of which are shifts in what today's undergraduates choose for their major. For instance, data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) reveal that, since 2008, there has been a precipitous…

We regularly compare magnitudes and describe these comparisons to other people. This article reports 9 experiments that examine how messages about the relative magnitude of two items affect inferences about the items' spatial arrangement. Native English speakers were given sentences such as "One tree is taller than the other," and their…

Executive function (EF) is a key cognitive process that emerges in early childhood and facilitates children's ability to control their own behavior. Individual differences in EF skills early in life are predictive of quality-of-life outcomes 30 years later (Moffitt et al., 2011). What changes in the brain give rise to this critical cognitive…

The present study reflects the results obtained from a diagnosis carried out with Education students concerning the writing of academic essays. The objective was to identify the perceptions that Comprehensive Education students have about their ability to write academic essays. A descriptive cross-sectional research study was conducted at a single…

Cognitive effort is costly and this cost likely influences the activities in which children engage. Yet, little is known about how school-age children perceive cognitive effort. The subjective value of cognitive effort, that is, how valuable or costly effort is perceived, was investigated in seventy-three 7- to 12-year-olds using an effort…

The hippocampus has long been recognized as important for the formation of long-term memory. Recent work has suggested that the hippocampus might also be important for certain kinds of spatial operations, as in constructing scenes, shifting perspective, or perceiving the geometry of scenes and their boundaries. We explored this proposal using a…

The term "polymath" refers to a person whose expertise approaches different subject areas, to rely on complex packages of knowledge for solving problems. Famous polymaths from history include Galileo Galilei, Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, and Albert Einstein; individuals that have impacted science, arts, humanities, and our society for…

The purpose of the present investigation was to examine the eyewitness memory performance of 3- and 5-year-old African American children (N = 33) from lowincome households. The children were asked to remember the routine details of a physical examination immediately after the physical exam and again after a delay interval of 6 weeks. Age-related…

Nonword reading measures are widely used to index children's phonics knowledge, and are included in the Phonics Screening Check currently implemented in England and under consideration in Australia. However, critics have argued that the use of nonword measures disadvantages good readers, as they will be influenced by their strong lexical knowledge…

Three-experiments examined the number of qualitatively different processing dimensions needed to account for inductive and deductive reasoning. In each study, participants were presented with arguments that varied in logical validity and consistency with background knowledge (believability), and evaluated them according to deductive criteria…

In organizations, the assessment of mental abilities is a common way to predict learning success. This paper analyses the effect of general mental ability on skill retention and examines the relationship between refresher interventions and general mental ability in terms of skill retention. Two hundred sixty-six adult participants were trained to…

Several studies have explored the determinants of anthropomorphism: the tendency to endow nonhuman agents with human features, goals, and intentions. Less is known of the cognitive benefits that may arise from anthropomorphism. Following research in narrative comprehension, we explored how the attribution of human-like features and intentional…

Although "Girls are as good as boys at math" explicitly expresses equality, we predict it could nevertheless suggest that boys have more raw talent. In statements with this subject-complement structure, the item in the complement position serves as the reference point and is thus considered more typical and prominent. This explains why…

Purpose: This research was conducted to investigate the potential of the ERCoRe learning model in empowering the retention of students' of different academic ability. Research Methods: This was a quasi-experimental research using pre-test and post-test non-equivalent control group design of 2x2. There were two independent variables. The first…

Cognitive load is a relevant phenomenon experienced by novice teachers moment-to-moment in complex classroom environments. Teachers learning to teach within the classroom daily encounter mental workload, but the latter has played little part in learning design for teachers, although other professions demanding complex performanes have made use of…