Immordino-Yang's description of the unexpected recovery of 2 boys with severe brain trauma is an example of the interplay between the plasticity of the brain and the plasticity of the context. It highlights the dynamics of "wants and cans" and the specific role of motivation in this dynamic. As an example of how this dynamic can evolve in…

The article by Carota and Sirigu addresses a fundamental issue, namely the domain specificity of people's ability to learn and implement sequential structures of events. The authors review theoretical positions and empirical findings related to this issue, providing a useful summary of representative models of sequential event structures, and a…

New technology-enabled assessments offer the potential to understand more than just whether a student answered a test question right or wrong. Using multiple forms of media that enable both visual and graphical representations, these assessments present complex, multistep problems for students to solve and collect detailed information about an…

This paper summarizes the findings from a K-6 professional development program that emphasized scientific inquiry and nature of science within the theme of scientific modeling. During the 2-week summer workshop and follow up school year workshops, the instruction modeled a 5-E learning cycle approach. Pre and posttesting measured teachers' views…

Cue competition is one of the most studied phenomena in associative learning. However, a theoretical disagreement has long stood over whether it reflects a learning or performance deficit. The comparator hypothesis, a model of expression of Pavlovian associations, posits that learning is not subject to competition but that performance reflects a…

In the cognitive skill literature, between-session delays have been treated either as having a negligible effect on performance or as causing forgetting. In contrast, in the procedural skill literature, overnight between-session delays can result in performance gains. In 5 multi-session data sets, the author demonstrates that neither of these 2…

Humans and animals learn from experience by reducing the probability of sampling alternatives with poor past outcomes. Using simulations, J. G. March (1996) illustrated how such adaptive sampling could lead to risk-averse as well as risk-seeking behavior. In this article, the author develops a formal theory of how adaptive sampling influences risk…

In this paper, we explore the importance of being conscious of the needs of indigenous students within the education system in order to increase their learning process and decrease their dropout rates. Specifically, we discuss how Mayan language, culture, and ideologies affect the educational outcome of Mayan students in mainstream classes in…

The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of a research conducted to evaluate the effect of learning preconceptions, prior e-learning experience, ability and interest of students on their perceptions regarding the process of e-learning. We study the effectiveness of e-learning as it relates to the level of e-learning experience. The…

It is crucial for teachers to communicate effectively about educational objectives to students, colleagues, and others in education. In 1956, Bloom developed a cognitive learning taxonomy to enhance communication between college examiners. The Bloom taxonomy consists of 6 hierarchical levels of learning (knowledge, comprehension, application,…

This study examines the process by which system thinking perceptions develop within the context of a water cycle curriculum. Four junior high school students undergoing an especially designed inquiry-based intervention were closely observed before, during, immediately after, and 6 years after completing a year long systems-based learning program.…

How children go about learning the general regularities that govern language, as well as keeping track of the exceptions to them, remains one of the challenging open questions in the cognitive science of language. Computational modeling is an important methodology in research aimed at addressing this issue. We must determine appropriate learning…

This article examines the role of subjective familiarity in the implicit and explicit learning of artificial grammars. Experiment 1 found that objective measures of similarity (including fragment frequency and repetition structure) predicted ratings of familiarity, that familiarity ratings predicted grammaticality judgments, and that the extremity…

This article integrates behavioral approaches into the teaching and learning of quantitative subjects with application to statistics. Focusing on the emotional component of learning, the article presents a system dynamic model that provides descriptive and prescriptive accounts of learners' anxiety. Metaphors and the metaphorizing process are…

This article proposes a new model of human concept learning that provides a rational analysis of learning feature-based concepts. This model is built upon Bayesian inference for a grammatically structured hypothesis space--a concept language of logical rules. This article compares the model predictions to human generalization judgments in several…