Students often view physiological mechanisms in descriptive terms from a perspective that does not help them recognize causal relationships. The "view from the inside" is a technique that helps students focus on causal relationships from the "viewpoint" of a reporter standing inside of the system. Qualitative data indicate that the technique helps…

This study investigates the strategies and assumptions that college students entering an introductory physical geology laboratory use to interpret topographic maps, and follows the progress of the students during the laboratory to analyze changes in those strategies and assumptions. To elicit students' strategies and assumptions, we created and…

In instructional multimedia design, it is often recommended that text accompanying pictures be presented in a personalised style to promote learning. The superiority of personalised over formal text is may be explained using social agency theory (Mayer, 2005b), but it has not been investigated empirically whether such effects are valid in…

This study examined the differences in the level of 7th-grade Turkish students' cognitive and metacognitive strategy use (rehearsal, elaboration, organization, critical thinking, and metacognitive self-regulation) in science and investigated the contribution of cognitive and metacognitive strategy use to students' science achievement. The present…

Mathematics concepts are most often taught using auditory, sequential instructional methods. Not only are these methods ineffective when used with visual-spatial learners, they may be detrimental to both academic and emotional progress. Ways in which visual-spatial learners process information are explained. One child's story is presented,…

Working memory has been called the "door to learning" (think the library) and is strongly related to performance in reading comprehension and problem-solving. Persons with strong working memory have a wide open door for acquiring all types of new information. They are able to hang on to new information, work with it, integrate it with lots of…

The relative importance of mental effort, as indicated by strategy use, and persistence as potential mediators of the memory self-efficacy (MSE)/memory performance relationship was investigated within a sample of 26 adults aged 65 years and older. It was found that persistence but not strategy use was predictive of performance on a free-recall…

This paper reports on a study that used verbal protocols to uncover the cognitive strategies of children from Sydney, Australia, aged 8- to 9-years-old, when they were engaged in a range of word sorting and editing activities. The children's cognitive strategies have been analysed in terms of a developmental stage theory of spelling. The findings…

Neural correlates of intrasubject variability (ISV) were studied using functional magnetic resonance imaging in 25 children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and typically developing(TD) children performing simple go/no-go tasks. Results concluded that in children with ADHD, dysfunction of premotor systems resulted in increased…

Recent developments in computing and mobile technologies have enabled the mobile and ubiquitous learning approach, which situates students in an environment that combines real-world and digital-world learning resources. Although such an approach seems to be innovative and interesting, several problems have been revealed when applying it to…

The reality is that approximately 5-8% of school-age students have memory or other cognitive deficits that interfere with their ability to acquire, master, and apply mathematical concepts and skills (Geary, 2004). These students with Mathematical Learning Disabilities (MLD) are at risk for failure in middle school mathematics because they…

This study reviews theories supporting the construction of student knowledge and found they rely upon theoretical operations with few pragmatic applications. A new paradigm of learning needs to emerge which focuses on how students actually construct their own knowledge, based on reconstructing current/past knowledge or experience, and their…

This article presents 12 practical ways of learning as adults at cognitive, affective, and performance levels. Focused on four areas of active engagement, learners are encouraged to trust themselves in formal as well as informal settings with their variety of learning styles, intelligences, and degrees of self-direction. The importance of…

Each year, more teachers learn about the successful intervention program known as Math Recovery (USMRC 2008; Wright 2003). The program uses Steffe's whole-number schemes to model, understand, and support children's development of whole-number reasoning. Readers are probably less familiar with Steffe's fraction schemes, which have proven similarly…

This article serves two functions. First, it addresses why studying collaborative discourse and collaborative argumentation is important for promoting students' deep-level understanding of content. A literature review is presented examining the evidence for this claim, concluding that engaging in collaborative discourse and argumentation might…