The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the supportive effects of conceptual change texts documented in science education (1) can also be demonstrated in the domain of social cognition and (2) are moderated by the structure of the text and the learner's central executive capacity. In two experiments, participants were presented…

In the world, the manners and paths of motion events take place together, but in language, these features are expressed separately. How do infants learn to process motion events in linguistically appropriate ways? Forty-six English-learning 7- to 9-month-olds were habituated to a motion event in which a character performed both a manner and a…

Many cognitive scientists regard language as a rich source of evidence about the human mind. Much research over the past forty years has been driven by the assumption that words reveal underlying concepts. At the same time, cross-linguistic work has shown that languages differ dramatically in how they partition the world by name. To maintain the…

As an important subject in the curriculum, many students find chemistry concepts difficult to learn and understand. Chemical bonding especially is important in understanding the compositions of chemical compounds and related concepts and research has shown that students struggle with this concept. In this theoretical paper based on analysis of…

This study investigated the predictive ability of an intentional learning model in the change of preservice early childhood teachers' conceptual understanding of lunar phases. Fifty-two preservice early childhood teachers who were enrolled in an early childhood science methods course participated in the study. Results indicated that the use…

Background: The ability to generate and flexibly change concepts is of great importance for the development of academic and adaptive skills. This paper analyses the conceptual reasoning ability of children with mild intellectual disability (MID) by their achievements on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). Method: The sample consisted of 95…

This research project aimed to identify and analyze Mexican primary school students' ideas about the components of the solar system. In particular, this study focused on conceptions of the solar system and representations of the dynamics of the solar system based on the functional and structural models that students make in school. Using a…

This article notes the convergence of recent thinking in neuroscience and grounded cognition regarding the way we understand mental representation and recollection: ideas are dynamic and multi-modal, actively created at the point of recall. Also, neurophysiologically, re-entrant signalling among cortical circuits allows non-conscious processing to…

Educational research and practice have proven that there are many benefits for applying learning theories' recommendations through teaching and learning of different subjects in all school levels. Based on interrelationships among learning theories of contextualism, connectivism, constructivism, and cognitivism, the researcher proposed an…

The main purposes of this study were to test the effects of teaching at-risk 4th graders to provide explanations for their mathematics work and examine whether those effects occur by compensating for limitations in cognitive processes. We randomly assigned 212 children to 3 conditions: a control group and 2 variants of a multicomponent fraction…

Even though reflective symmetry is heavily embedded in the everyday, learners continue to experience challenges when they mathematize concepts from this informal/everyday context. In this article we argue that symmetry exists in nature, it can also be symbolized algebraically and it can be abstracted into the world of axioms and theorems. We…

Disagreement exists regarding the functional locus of semantic interference of distractor words in picture naming. This effect is a cornerstone of modern psycholinguistic models of word production, which assume that it arises in lexical response-selection. However, recent evidence from studies of dual-task performance suggests a locus in…

In abstraction, or conceptual behavior, people discriminate features or properties of their surroundings. This permits people to respond selectively and precisely to specialized features of their environment, which has had many benefits, including steady advances in science and technology. Within psychology, J. R. Kantor and B. F. Skinner…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of epistemic beliefs and knowledge representations in cognitive and metacognitive processing when learning about physics concepts through text. Specifically, we manipulated the representation of physics concepts in texts about Newtonian mechanics and explored how these texts interacted with…

Diverse implicit cognitive elements seem to support but also constrain reasoning in different domains. Many of these cognitive constraints can be thought of as either implicit assumptions about the nature of things or reasoning heuristics for decision-making. In this study we applied this framework to investigate college students' understanding of…