With many distractions competing for students' attention, student engagement and knowledge retention are more important than ever. "Where Learning Happens" explores the types of attention--sustained, selective, divided, and effective--in depth and provides research-suggested strategies to maximize student attention and engagement. By…

If students haven't developed the brain-based skills to focus, catch and correct errors, identify cause-and-effect relationships, and more, they can't make sense of lessons. Executive function is the missing link to student achievement. But how can you develop this in the classroom? Bestselling author Nancy Sulla has the answers. She explains how…

Digital learning increasingly makes use of realistic visualizations, although realism can be demanding for learners. Color coding is a popular way of helping learners understand visualizations and has been found to aid in learning with detailed visualizations. However, previous research has shown that color coding must not always be an effective…

The purpose of this article is to provide a theoretical account of the experience of stuttering that incorporates previous explanations and recent experimental findings. According to this account, stuttering-like disfluencies emerge during early childhood from excessive detection of cognitive conflict due to subtle limitations in speech and…

We investigated whether the phenomenological experience of mental time travel is similar when one travels as oneself versus with another possible self. Participants first described and rated their phenomenological experience for an autobiographical memory, a counterfactual event, and a future event (real-self condition). Then, they imagined…

It is difficult to monitor whether information was originally retrieved internally, from our own memory, or externally, from another person or a device. We report two experiments that examined whether people were more likely to confuse prior access to information on a smartphone with accessing their own knowledge. Participants were experimentally…

Both sketching and self-explanation are widely believed to be effective for problem-solving in science learning. However, it is unclear which aspects of these strategies promote learning and how they might interact. Compared to a read-only baseline, we examined the impact of instructing 11-year-old students to solve science problems to sketch,…

Studies on children's understanding of counting examine when and how children acquire the cardinal principle: the idea that the last word in a counted set reflects the cardinal value of the set. Using Wynn's (1990) Give-N Task, researchers classify children who can count to generate large sets as having acquired the cardinal principle…

Rubrics, which are designed to inform learners about assessment criteria and quality levels concerning a task assignment, are a widely used means to support learners in self-assessing their task performance. Usually, rubrics enhance task performance. Surprisingly, however, relatively little is known about the underlying mechanisms via which…

Classroom response systems (i.e., clickers) have become increasingly popular to facilitate student learning. Unfortunately, the common practice of pausing a lecture to ask questions takes up precious time to cover content. Asking questions "on the fly" without pausing is a possible solution. But can students both attend to lecture and…

We examined the relationship between the Early start Denver model (ESDM) intervention and mu rhythm attenuation, an EEG paradigm reflecting neural processes associated with action perception and social information processing. Children were assigned to either receive comprehensive ESDM intervention for two years, or were encouraged to pursue…

Statistical knowledge of a target's location may benefit visual search, and rapidly understanding the changes in regularity would increase the adaptability in visual search situations where fast and accurate performance is required. The current study tested the sources of statistical knowledge--explicitly-given instruction or experience-driven…

The use of realistic visualizations has gained considerable interest due to the proliferation of virtual reality equipment. This review is concerned with the theoretical basis, technical implementation, cognitive effects, and educational implications of using realistic visualizations. Realism can be useful for learners, but in several studies,…

The articles in this special issue take an important step in beginning to test the PET framework. Together, these articles illustrate the importance of considering individual differences in attitudes and prior knowledge as well as differences in task demands when investigating the role of emotions in shaping cognitive processing while reading…

A large body of research has revealed that viewing example image stimuli tends to constrain creative idea generation. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying such visual fixation in creative cognition are unclear. In the present experiment, we explored whether example images impacted creative imagination and patterns of neural activity…