This research examined the impact of formative quizzes on e-learning designed to teach volunteers how to tutor struggling readers. Three research questions were addressed: (1) Do embedded quizzes facilitate learning of e-content? (2) Does the announcement of upcoming quizzes affect learning? (3) Does prior knowledge interact with quizzing and…

Errors, or "bugs", in addition and subtraction problems of signed numbers are driven by misconceptions or incomplete knowledge at various components of procedural tasks, and result in erroneous rules of operation for carrying out computational problems. These rules, including the right one, are represented by the responses to a…

Children ages 6 to 13 and college students were asked to remember length relationships for three pairs of sticks. For six- and seven-year-olds, relationships between interlinked pairs were much more difficult to retain than were relationships between unrelated pairs. (Author/MP)

Second and sixth graders acquired information about a large-scale environment either actively or passively. They were subsequently asked to estimate distances in either active or passive response style. Unlike the older children, second graders did not estimate distances accurately when acquisition and response activities were incongruent.…

Reyna and Brainerd supplement arguments they made previously in this issue by advancing five additional reasons for preferring output-interference explanations over the resources hypothesis. (RH)

Proposes a metatheory of problem solving. Describes differences among problems in terms of their structured ness, domain specificity (abstractness), and complexity; describes individual differences that affect problem solving; and presents a typology of problems, each of which engages different cognitive, affective, and conative process and…

A category effect (i.e., living vs. nonliving exemplars) in confrontation naming has been reported in association with various cerebral pathologies. However, the published reports conflict as to the presence of this category effect in normal controls. The present experiment included 90 subjects in three age groups (young, young-elderly, and…

Many studies report information overload as one of the main problems that students encounter in online learning via computer-mediated communication. This study aimed to explore the sources of online students' information overload and offer suggestions for increasing students' cognitive resources for learning. Participants were 12 graduate students…

The purpose of this review is to provide educational practitioners with a brief overview of cognitive load theory (CLT) and its major implications for learning. To achieve this objective, the article includes a short description of human cognitive architecture as conceived by cognitive load theorists. Following this overview, the article provides…

The thinking processes of students of Logo were examined to identify programming problems and possible instructional remedies. Subjects were 11 students between the ages of 8 and 12 who had completed 5 weeks of Logo instruction. These students were given a series of five short programming problems highlighting such areas of difficulty as judging…

The Ravens Standard Progressive Matrices Test was administered to 48 subjects who then performed a card-sorting task under single- and competing-task conditions. Hick's Law and the Roth-Jensen procedure were used in task development. Complexity should have a more central role in speed of processing models of intelligence than ability to divide…

Involving children three and four years of age, studies examined the basis for the difficulty of discriminating between left-right orientations of a shape in standard two-choice task. It was concluded that difficulty of left-right judgments lies in the cognitive demands of the task and is to be understood in the same terms as other problems in…

Three experiments investigated the dynamics of human infant visual fixation. Results showed that, over a series of trials, four-month-olds fixate longer on a complex than on a simple stimulus. Findings challenge prevailing cognitive-schema theories as a complete account of the dynamics of infant visual fixation. A two-process theory that accounts…