Geoscience instructors and textbooks rely on analogy for teaching students a wide range of content, from the most basic concepts to highly complicated systems. The goal of this paper is to connect educational and cognitive science research on analogical thinking with issues of geoscience instruction. Analogies convey that the same basic…

Although word searching in children is very common, very little is known about how adults support children in the turns following the child's search behaviours, an important topic because of the social, educational, and clinical implications. This study characterizes, in detail, teachers' use of prompting, hinting, and supplying a model. From a…

Lien, Ruthruff, Remington, & Johnston (2005) reported residual switch cost differences between stimulus-response (S-R) pairs and proposed the partial-mapping preparation (PMP) hypothesis, which states that advance preparation will typically be limited to a subset of S-R pairs because of structural capacity limitations, to account for these…

Scientific literacy is now seen as an essential component of informed citizenship and a key curriculum goal in many parts of the world. The relevant literature is vast and replete with a variety of definitions, descriptions, prescriptions, slogans and theoretical perspectives. It addresses not only formal education but also fields as diverse as…

The current authors reply to a response by Bowers on a comment by the current authors on the original article. A typical problem in any discussion about grandmother cells is that there is not a general consensus about what should be called as such. Here, we discuss possible interpretations in turn and contrast them with what we find in our own…

An integrative model is proposed for understanding the development of physical and relational aggression in early and middle childhood. The central goal was to posit a new theoretical framework that expands on existing social-cognitive and gender schema models (i.e., Social Information-Processing Model of Children's Adjustment [N. R. Crick & K. A.…

Spatial ability tasks appear on many intelligence and aptitude tests. Although the construct validity of spatial ability tests has often been studied through traditional correlational methods, such as factor analysis, less is known about the cognitive processes involved in solving test items. This study examines the cognitive processes involved in…

Children often experience the influence of technology around them, but there is little emphasis placed on technology within a scientific education in Grundschule (primary schools) in Germany. One of the reasons for this could be a lack of research projects that ascertain young learners' conceptions of technical issues. So there is no basis for…

The current review is concerned with an information processing model used in science education. The purpose is to summarise the current theoretical understanding, in published research, of a number of factors that are known to influence learning and achievement. These include field independence, working memory, long-term memory, and the use of…

Split fovea theory proposes that when the eyes are fixated within a written word, visual information about the letters falling to the left of fixation is projected initially to the right cerebral hemisphere while visual information about the letters falling to the right of fixation is projected to the left cerebral hemisphere. The two parts of the…

Naming a picture of a dog primes the subsequent naming of a picture of a dog (repetition priming) and interferes with the subsequent naming of a picture of a cat (semantic interference). Behavioral studies suggest that these effects derive from persistent changes in the way that words are activated and selected for production, and some have…

This study investigated the possibility that lifelong bilingualism may lead to enhanced efficiency in the ability to shift between mental sets. We compared the performance of monolingual and fluent bilingual college students in a task-switching paradigm. Bilinguals incurred reduced switching costs in the task-switching paradigm when compared with…

Rational models of cognition typically consider the abstract computational problems posed by the environment, assuming that people are capable of optimally solving those problems. This differs from more traditional formal models of cognition, which focus on the psychological processes responsible for behavior. A basic challenge for rational models…

Research Findings: All human activity, beyond the simplest of reflexes or biological reactions, is a manifestation of intentions. When those intentions are directed toward changes in one's understanding or performance, they can be labeled "intentionality to learn". In this article, we overview particular premises about intentionality to learn and…

The 3 most often-used performance measures in the cognitive and decision sciences are choice, response or decision time, and confidence. We develop a random walk/diffusion theory--2-stage dynamic signal detection (2DSD) theory--that accounts for all 3 measures using a common underlying process. The model uses a drift diffusion process to account…