Knowledge tracing (KT) for evaluating students' knowledge is an essential task in personalized education. More and more researchers have devoted themselves to solving KT tasks, e.g., deep knowledge tracing (DKT), which can capture more sophisticated representations of student knowledge. Nonetheless, these techniques ignore the reconstruction of…

This study investigates how working memory (WM) capacity and L2 linguistic knowledge affect L2 literal and inferential reading comprehension, considering the presence or absence of background knowledge. Eighty upper-intermediate to advanced adult English learners participated, completing tasks to assess WM capacity, background knowledge, L2…

This study examined the direct and indirect effects of foundational language (vocabulary and syntactic knowledge) and literacy (orthographic knowledge) skills, transcription (spelling and handwriting fluency), and higher-order cognitive skills (comprehension monitoring and inferencing making) on writing among Chinese children. Participants were…

We analyze here how pre-service teachers explicate their views about the wave-particle duality of photons and what role it plays in their arguments supporting the quantum nature of light. The data for the analysis is provided by 12 written reports about the double-slit experiment with feeble light. The analysis is based on constructing semantic…

Most students have interacted with scientific representations that are used as teaching resources in schools. Often these external representations present challenges for understanding. By utilizing a framework based on an inferential, epistemic approach to scientific representations, we have analyzed students' representational constructions of the…

For successful learning, students need to evaluate their learning status relative to their learning goals and regulate their study in response to such monitoring. The present study investigated whether making metacognitive judgments on previously studied text would enhance the learning of that studied (backward effect) and newly studied text…

Children are sensitive to their own and others' epistemic states and use these to guide their learning and communication. Here, we systematically examined children's use of epistemic states to make diagnostic social inferences. Specifically, we investigated children's group membership inferences based on what others do and do not know and what…

To better understand the developmental trajectory of children's pragmatic development, studies that examine more than one type of implicature as well as associated linguistic and cognitive factors are required. We investigated three- to five-year-old English-speaking children's (N = 71) performance in ad hoc quantity, scalar quantity and relevance…

Background: We examined the influence of text and reader characteristics on sixth graders' inference generation. Methods: Eleven- to 12-year-old US monolingual English speakers (N = 71) and Spanish-English bilinguals (N = 81) read narrative and informational expository texts requiring an inference and answered an inference-tapping question after…

Infants are able to use the contexts in which familiar words appear to guide their inferences about the syntactic category of novel words (e.g. 'This is a' + 'dax' -> dax = object). The current study examined whether 18-month-old infants can rapidly adapt these expectations by tracking the distribution of syntactic structures in their input. In…

We investigated 4- and 5-year-olds' (N = 194) appreciation of the link between knowledge and ownership. Namely, we asked whether preschoolers appreciate the ways in which owners are typically knowledgeable about artifacts. Experiment 1 revealed that 4- and 5-year-olds view owners as better sources of knowledge about artifacts than those who simply…

Human communication relies on the ability to take into account the speaker's mental state to infer the intended meaning of an utterance in context. For example, a sentence such as 'Some of the animals are safe to pet' can be interpreted as giving rise to the inference 'Some and not all animals are safe to pet' when uttered by an expert. The same…

The role of statistics is wide and crucial in daily life, making statistics important. Many students have difficulty understanding statistics. This study aims to determine students' statistical reasoning about inference statistics, which is limited to the subject matter of the testing hypotheses about two-sample hypotheses testing. This study used…

This study examined the direct and indirect relations of foundational language skills (vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, and orthographic knowledge), higher-order cognitive skills (inference making and comprehension monitoring), and word reading to reading comprehension in Chinese. Consistent with the hierarchical relations specified in the Direct…

Proving and refuting are fundamental aspects of mathematical practice that are intertwined in mathematical activity in which conjectures and proofs are often produced and improved through the back-and-forth transition between attempts to prove and disprove. One aspect underexplored in the education literature is the connection between this…