This research memorandum highlights the collaborative efforts of the numeracy panel for the ETS Return on Investment (ROI) Study, Phase 1, comprising David Tout, Kees Hoogland, and Javier Díez-Palomar, in developing their research memorandum, "Improving the Quality of Numeracy Skills: Progressing from Level 2 to Level 4 on the PIAAC Cycle 2…

Research on memory functions and their applications is a vast field that has unfolded for decades; some important studies are sixty years old. However, the research has remained a well-kept secret of cognitive psychologists. Education faculties rarely teach memory specifics, so people working in education typically do not know about the above…

Learning is an ever-present phenomenon. It takes place irrespective of time and place. It engages learners in their interested topic/content. Learning absorbs many skills, such as; reading skills, writing skills, technological skills, emotional skills, behavioral skills, cognitive skills, and language skills. Out of all these, cognitive skills…

The purpose of this study was to investigate novices learning to use a mission planning system. Novice participants received one training session, followed by three test sessions. This was compared to expert performance. During the test sessions, all participants were required to "think aloud", based on Ericsson and Simon's (Ericsson, K.A. and…

In this study, qualitative evidence is collected--through classroom observations and teacher and student interviews--to study the effect of metacognition and the interaction between students' observable cognitive behaviour and the instructional task. This qualitative data is analysed to identify what factors support and improve students'…

Emerging parallel processing and increased flexibility during the acquisition of cognitive skills form a combination that is hard to reconcile with rule-based models that often produce brittle behavior. Rule-based models can exhibit these properties by adhering to 2 principles: that the model gradually learns task-specific rules from instructions…

Purpose: Previous studies (e.g., G. Wulf, M. HoB, & W. Prinz, 1998; G. Wulf, B. Lauterbach, & T. Toole, 1999; for a review, see G. Wulf & W. Prinz, 2001) have reported that limb motor performance is enhanced when individuals adopt an external focus (focusing on the effect of the movement) versus an internal focus of attention (focusing on body…

A major focus of the psychology of instruction is understanding and facilitating the changes in cognition and performance that occur as an individual moves from low to higher competence in a domain of knowledge and skill. A new program of research which examines the initial state of the learner as a component of this transition in competence is…

This paper is a commentary on three other papers presented at the 1983 American Educational Research Association Symposium on "The Trainability of Information Processing and Problem Solving Skills." The papers focus on certain aspects of the training of complex skills, such as reading, that can presumably be broken down into a variety of skills.…

This chapter considers the professional status of instructional developers, the skills they need, and how those skills should be taught. Three differing approaches are discussed and critiqued: the specific skills approach; an approach which advocates the addition of "higher level" skills to the list of specific skills; and an "underlying skills"…

Training softball catchers is challenging. The nature of the position makes it one of the most difficult to play because of the breadth of a catcher's responsibilities. Although the demands on a pitcher or other players are significant, their roles are less complex than the catcher's, who is actively involved in the game at many different levels…

This report explores the complex agenda of issues, promise, and problems that building a developmental science of programming entails and emphasizes the need to highlight different types of programming and programmers, the different cognitive subtasks involved in programming, and the social character of many programming efforts. An introduction…

Examines the role of cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational skills in problem solving. Cognitive skills include instructional objectives, components in a learning hierarchy, and information-processing components. Metacognitive skills include strategies for reading comprehension, writing, and mathematics. Motivational skills include motivation…

This report relates current attentional research and theory to the development of skilled performance, with emphasis on how performance changes with practice. Dual process attention theory is reviewed, and the distinction between automatic and controlled processing is examined. The changing interactions between automatic and controlled processing…

This paper discusses the relationship between the mediation of task performance by some structure that is not inherent in the task domain itself and the phenomenon of automatization, in which skilled performance becomes effortless or phenomenologically "automatic" after extensive practice. The use of a common simple explicit mediating…