Tasks used in the Biology Olympiad (BiO) appear to be promising alternatives to traditional teaching tasks in biology education, as they frequently incorporate inquiry-based elements. This makes them a valuable resource for increasing students' exposure to inquiry activities during classroom instruction. However, for teachers to effectively…

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of the causal connectivity of the statements ("low-medium-high"), elaboration question condition ("focused on the identification of main ideas-focused on the identification of speakers' emotions") and the modality of presentation of discourse ("oral-written") in the…

Reaction mechanisms are a core component of organic chemistry. Being able to handle these mechanisms is a central skill for students in this discipline. Diagnosing and fostering mechanistic reasoning is hence an important branch of chemistry education research. When it comes to reasoning about mechanisms, students often experience difficulties…

The lack of research exploring the influence of dynamic visual narratives on inference skills prompted the present study with an aim to profile the inference skills in school children between the ages of 6 years and 9 years 11 months using dynamic visual narratives. A total of 80 participants were considered for the study. An animated story was…

Young children excel at pragmatic inferences known as ad hoc quantity implicatures: they can infer, for example, that a speaker who said "the card with apples" meant the card with "nothing but" apples. However, it is not known whether children take into account the speaker's perspective in deriving such inferences, as adults…

Readers should construct a coherent discourse during reading comprehension. The ability to build coherence has been examined using coherence and cohesion judgment tasks. Although eye-tracking studies have been conducted on building coherence or processing cohesion among native language users, few such studies have been conducted with second…

Two studies examined factors that predicted children's tendencies to match objects versus relations across scenes when no instruction was given. Study 1 examined a) age and b) nationality as a proxy for cultural differences in experiences with relations. The results showed that Chinese and U.S. children across ages all showed an initial bias to…

Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus constructions at adult-like levels before 7 years of age. Children's comparable limitations with lexically triggered scalar implicatures, inferences with an…

It is generally agreed that first language (L1) morphological awareness, the ability to reflect upon, analyze and manipulate morphemes and morphological structure of words, can transfer and facilitate second language (L2) reading subskill acquisition. However, the facilitative role of L1 morphological awareness is unclear in the literature…

The present study reports a large, cross-sectional study of Mandarin-speaking children's ability to compute quantity implicatures. To chart the developmental trajectory of this pragmatic ability, we tested 225 Mandarin-speaking children aged 4-8 years on their interpretations of scalar and non-scalar implicatures, as well as numerals. Scalar…

A large amount of literature exists on how native speakers derive and process pragmatic inferences, yet few studies have examined the issue in second language learners, despite a controversial debate of second language (L2) ultimate attainment of phenomena situated at external interfaces. This study contributes to the debate on the integration of…

In judgment and categorization, the task is to infer the criterion value of an object based on cues. The cognitive mechanisms underlying such inferences are often distinguished in terms of whether they rely on an abstracted cue-criterion rule or on retrieving exemplars. The use of cue-based and exemplar-based strategies (and the associated…

This study explores the use of the Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), a neuro-fuzzy approach, to analyze the log data of technology-based assessments to extract relevant features of student problem-solving processes, and develop and refine a set of fuzzy logic rules that could be used to interpret student performance. The log data that…

This study examines second language (L2) learners' perspectives regarding the affordances and challenges of using the Data-Driven Learning (DDL) to identify the properties of near-synonymous words. Employing a convergent mixed-method design, this study deciphers the perceptions of 40 undergraduate L2 learners majoring in English language teaching.…

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (HRD) is a fundamental representation in stellar physics. It contains information about key properties of stars and allows inferences about stellar evolution. The use of the HRD is an important disciplinary activity in astrophysics. For example, it is particularly important to have a graphical understanding of the…