In this study of more than 1,000 typical and at-risk elementary Arabic-speaking students in Oman, we explore relationships between pragmatic (and other) language skills, literacy, cognition, and behavior and the degree to which demography impacts performance on associated tasks. We found, in most cases, that females performed better than males,…

In the field of second and foreign language education, conscious cognitive models of motivation dominate, while the role of unconscious motivation has not been studied systematically. Expanding the language motivation research to include implicit processes is likely to enrich the field of language learning and open up new contributions to current…

Risky decisions are often characterized by (a) imprecision about consequences and their likelihoods that can be reduced by information collection, and by (b) unavoidable background risk. This article addresses both aspects by eliciting risk attitude, prudence, and temperance in decisions from description and decisions from experience. The results…

Argumentation is an important aspect in the field of education because of its impact on learning processes. At the same time, argumentation is a complex activity in terms of cognitive, relational, emotional and social dynamics. In this paper, I investigate and I describe possible difficulties encountered by children during the argumentative…

Children exhibit a self-relevance effect whereby they share more candies with close friends and acquaintances than with strangers. The present study aimed to reduce the negative consequences of self-relevance effects by enhancing the behavioural control of sharing behaviour. This study initiated two behavioural control levels to investigate…

While previous work on postverbal subjects in Italian has shown that young children are sensitive to the effects of argument structure and definiteness, little is known about the acquisition of postverbal subjects at the VP-periphery. In response, the present study investigated such subjects under new-information focus by monolingual Italian…

In today's digital society, computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) and collaborative problem solving (CPS) have received increasing attention. CPS studies have often emphasized outcomes such as skill levels of CPS, whereas the action transitions in the paths to solve the problems related to these outcomes have been scarcely studied. The…

The purpose of this study was firstly to investigate the mathematical metacognitive characteristics of high-efficiency students by comparing high-efficiency and low-efficiency students. Secondly, the aim was to explore the pathways of mathematical metacognition of efficient mathematics learners in mathematics achievement. In this study,…

Designing and interpreting controlled experiments are important inquiry skills addressed in many current science curricula. The relevant skills associated with the design and interpretation of controlled experiments are summarised under the term control-of-variables strategy (CVS). Research on elementary school students' CVS skills shows that they…

Negated sentences are known to be more cognitively taxing than positive ones (i.e., "polarity effect"). We present evidence that two factors contribute to the polarity effect in verification tasks: processing the sentence and verifying its truth value. To quantify the relative contribution of each, we used a delayed verification task.…

It has been well-documented that although children around 4 years start to attribute false beliefs to others in classic false-belief tasks, they are still less able to evaluate the truth-value of propositional belief-reporting sentences, especially when belief conflicts with reality. This article investigates whether linguistic cues, verb…

This exploratory study reports on characteristics of proof production and proof writing observed in the work of first-year university students who took part in workshops on the theorem prover LEAN (https://leanprover.github.io). These workshops were voluntary and offered alongside a transition to proof module in a UK university. Through…

Learning to associate specific objects with value contributes to the human's adaptive behavior. However, the intrinsic nature of associative memory posits a challenge that newly learned associations may interfere with the old ones if they share common features (e.g., a reward). In the present study, we conducted a set of behavioral experiments and…

In this paper, we explore student solutions to a free response mathematical assessment task which had opportunities for students to notice structural properties in the context of number systems. In total, 308 students aged between 10 years to 13 years participated in the study. Their responses were analysed to determine whether they noticed…

Previous research indicates that long-term memory (LTM) may contribute to performance in working memory (WM) tasks. Across 3 experiments, we investigated the extent to which active maintenance in WM can be replaced by relying on information stored in episodic LTM, thereby freeing capacity for additional information in WM. First, participants…