A commonly accepted claim in mathematics education is that there is a relationship between the cognitive demand of mathematical task enactments and students' subsequent learning. One study often cited to support this claim is Stein and Lane (1996), and in 44% of those citations, Stein and Lane (1996) is the sole reference provided. Citation…

This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of training tutors in content knowledge of a particular domain versus training them in tutoring skills of pedagogical knowledge when tutoring on a complex tutee task. Forty-seven tutor--tutee pairs of fourth-year secondary school students were created and assigned to one of the two treatments.…

Stressful situations, the aversiveness of events, or increases in task difficulty (e.g., conflict) have repeatedly been shown to be capable of triggering attentional control adjustments. In the present study we tested whether the particularity of an fMRI testing environment (i.e., EPI noise) might result in such increases of the cognitive control…

Results on human performance on the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) from different laboratories show high consistency. However, one exception is in the area of individual differences. While one research group has consistently failed to find systematic individual differences across instances of TSPs (Chronicle, MacGregor and Ormerod), another…

The difficulty of four binary conceptual rules (conjunctive, disjunctive, conditional, and biconditional) was assessed using the rule-learning paradigm in a variety of stimulus populations. (Editor)

Four experiments are presented that examine the affective and the informational explanations of risk-preference behavior. Experiments I and II provide a phenomenological analysis of the affective and informational determinants of choice behavior while Experiments III and IV investigates at what level of difficulty individuals most desire…

On each of 10 trials, 80 college students were presented with a different set of five anagram tasks varying in complexity. Half the subjects rated the tasks for the amount of interestingness and half for the amount of pleasantness. (Editor/RK)

Levels of independent variable(s) are often mixed within each block of trials rather than each level being presented in a separate block in research of various types. Two experiments involving tasks of a visual nature were conducted to demonstrate that such mixing can easily obscure the effects of principal interest. A target circle was projected…

Discusses briefly some general problems in the development of taxonomic systems applicable to descriptions of human performance and tasks, describing some alternative approaches and provisional classification schemes, and reviewing some attempts to evaluate the utility and validity of these systems. (Author/JM)

Difficulties associated with the DACUM (Developing a Curriculum) process of the British Columbia Ministry of Education were identified in this study. Using a task analysis of a hunter's job, a set of procedures was developed that can improve the curriculum development process and, to some extent, overcome the difficulties associated with it. The…

Statistical methods employed to test individual differences in dual-task performance and the existence of a general time-sharing ability are reviewed and critiqued. Specifically, both the types of data being collected and the types of data analysis procedures have been inadequate to the critical evaluation of a hypothetical…

This article presents an explorative study, which is part of a comprehensive project to examine the impact of epistemological beliefs on metacognitive calibration during learning processes within a complex hypermedia information system. More specifically, this study investigates: 1) if learners differentiate between tasks of different complexity,…

The development of a probabilistic model for validating Gange's learning hierarchies is described. Learning hierarchies are defined as paired networks of intellectual tasks arranged so that a substantial amount of positive transfer occurs from tasks in a lower position to connected ones in a higher position. This probabilistic validation technique…