A significant problem for individuals with autism is the presence of stereotypic behaviors, that is, repetitive, invariant behavior patterns with no obvious goal or function. Stereotypic behaviors interfere with an individual's ability to participate in the daily activities of life, including learning. By reducing stereotypic behaviors in…

This paper exploits a natural experiment that produces exogenous variation on credit access to determine the effect on college enrollment. The paper assess how important are credit constraints to explain the gap in college enrollment by family income, and what would be the gap if credit constraints are eliminated. Progress in college and dropout…

This innovative textbook is the first to integrate learning and memory, behaviour, and cognition. It focuses on fascinating human research in both memory and learning (while also bringing in important animal studies) and brings the reader up to date with the latest developments in the subject. Students are encouraged to think critically: key…

Three experiments explored online recognition in a nonspeech domain, using a novel experimental paradigm. Adults learned to associate abstract shapes with particular melodies, and at test they identified a played melody's associated shape. To implicitly measure recognition, visual fixations to the associated shape versus a distractor shape were…

Children are judicious social learners. They may be particularly sensitive to communicative actions done pedagogically for their benefit, as such actions may mark important, generalizable information. Three experiments (N = 224) found striking differences in preschoolers' inductive generalization and exploration of a novel functional property,…

The purpose of this study was to test the instructional value of adding paper-based metacognitive prompting features to a gamelike environment for learning about electrical circuits, called the Circuit Game. In Experiment 1, students who were prompted during Levels 1 through 9 to direct their attention to the most relevant features of the game and…

When people reflect on their important values, they may become more attuned to the needs of others. Two longitudinal field experiments examined whether a subtle value-affirmation manipulation can initiate relatively enduring increases in young adolescents' prosocial feelings (Study 1; M [subscript age] = 12.9) and prosocial behaviors (Study 2; M…

The process of designing an experiment is a difficult one. Students often struggle to perform such tasks as the design process places a large cognitive load on students. Scaffolding is the process of providing support for a student to allow them to complete tasks they would otherwise not have been able to complete. This study sought to investigate…

Previous studies have found a late frontal-central audiovisual interaction during the time period about 150-220 ms post-stimulus. However, it is unclear to which process is this audiovisual interaction related: to processing of acoustical features or to classification of stimuli? To investigate this question, event-related potentials were recorded…

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that conversational perspective-taking is a determinant of unfamiliar ambiguous idiom comprehension. We investigated two types of ambiguous idiom, decomposable and nondecomposable expressions, which differ in the degree to which the literal meanings of the individual words contribute to the overall…

The impact of goal salience and verbal cues given by the model on 3- to 5-year-olds' reproduction of action components (movement or goal) was investigated in an imitation choice task. Preschoolers watched an experimenter moving a puppet up or down a ramp, terminating at one of two target objects. The target objects were either differently colored…

Introduction: Two experiments tested the hypothesis that relative metacomprehension accuracy is vulnerable when readers' cognitive efforts are biased by text order. It is proposed that the difficulty level of initial text information biases readers' estimates of text comprehension but is correctable when more cognitive effort is applied. Method:…

As part of a research project to evaluate the effects of sand and gravel mining on water quality, students were trained to analyze their own drinking water for simple quality indicators. Indicators analyzed were pH, conductivity, hardness, nitrate, chloride, and dissolved iron. Approximately 523 analyses were completed by students between 2006 and…

Despite the growing number of culturally sensitive training models and considerable literature on the importance of training clinicians in larger contextual issues, research examining how students learn to apply these issues is limited. In this participatory action research project, we systematically studied our own process as marriage and family…

Recent research results have failed to support the conventionally held belief that students learn physics best from hands-on experiences with physical equipment. Rather, studies have found that students who perform similar experiments with computer simulations perform as well or better on measures of conceptual understanding than their peers who…