Causal reasoning is important to children's cognition and academic development. However, there have been few empirical studies on the impact of visual cues and non-verbal scaffolding on children's reasoning in continuous causal processes. Hence, the present study aims to explore how causal reasoning in continuous processes is facilitated by visual…

Argument-based interventions in science education have largely been motivated by the perspective that students lack knowledge of argument. Recent studies, however, suggest that contextual factors influence students' argument quality. The authors hypothesize that a key limiting factor lies in students' abilities to recognize when to employ…

The authors investigated whether the amount of instructional guidance affects science learning and self-efficacy. Sixty 9- and 10-year-old children were randomly assigned to one of the following three instructional conditions: (a) guided instruction consisting of examples and student-generated explanations, (b) direct instruction consisting of a…

Two experiments with the inductive generalization procedure tested whether 16- and 20-month-old infants understand that animals and not vehicles follow a rational path to reach a goal. Infants were tested with four different events and the model exemplar was either an animal or ambiguous block. Results showed that infants at 20 months of age, but…

Describes experiments which focus on the perception of three dimensions. Discusses the cues about distance and depth and the role they have in perceptions of three dimensions. Evaluates the effect of color on the illusion on depth. (ML)