The landscape of undergraduate biology education has been shaped by decades of reform efforts calling for instruction to integrate core concepts and scientific skills as a means of helping students become proficient in the discipline. Assessments can be used to make inferences about how these reform efforts have translated into changes in…

Fostering creative minds has always been a premise to ensure adaptation to new challenges of human civilization. While some alternative educational settings (i.e., Montessori) were shown to nurture creative skills, it is unknown how they impact underlying brain mechanisms across the school years. This study assessed creative thinking and…

Purpose: There is evidence suggesting that aerobic exercise immediately after vocabulary training can improve word recall in school-age children. This work examined whether the previously identified word-learning benefits associated with exercise can be extended to preschoolers. Additionally, we evaluated whether the effects of physical activity…

Geometry education is an important aspect of STEM education and career development, but it is often overlooked in K-12 education in the United States. Although there is some research on teaching geometry to students with learning difficulties at the elementary level, there is a lack of research on teaching advanced geometry skills at high school…

Learners underperform in stoichiometry as they lack conceptual reasoning of the underlying concepts and the ability to solve stoichiometric problems. Therefore, it was necessary to determine if there is a statistical correlation between problem-solving skills and conceptual reasoning in stoichiometry and if so, whether one can significantly…

Instructional videos for teaching second language (L2) vocabulary often feature an instructor onscreen. The instructor in the video may involuntarily produce beat gestures with their hands, as occurs in real teaching settings. Beat gestures highlight key information in speech by conveying the rhythm of the language, but do not themselves convey…

The revived interest in the notion of 'evaluative judgement' in higher education is motivated by commitment of researchers and practitioners to effectively implement learning-oriented assessment and cultivate this high-order cognitive ability to develop students' capacity for self-regulated learning. Recent studies have examined the affordances…

Background: Key to optimizing Computational Thinking (CT) instruction is a precise understanding of the underlying cognitive skills. Román-González et al. (2017) reported unique contributions of spatial abilities and reasoning, whereas arithmetic was not significantly related to CT. Disentangling the influence of spatial and numerical skills on CT…

The worked example effect has been well documented within the framework of Cognitive Load Theory (CLT), which suggests that teaching with examples would be superior to engaging in unguided problem solving, particularly for novices, as using worked examples would reduce their cognitive load, compared to solving problems, thus facilitating knowledge…

In second language teaching and learning, making errors is inevitable as language learning requires a lot of cognitive effort and concentration on the part of learners. Understanding the types and frequencies of student errors is, therefore, an important issue for ESL and EFL teachers to determine how students can be helped to improve their skills…

This book highlights the importance of English academic vocabulary for success at university and explores written tasks as effective pedagogical tools to promote the acquisition of academic words. The book reviews germane and recent SLA, psycholinguistic, corpus linguistics, and L2 writing research to underscore the challenges associated with the…

The present study evaluated: (1) the effects of two training programs designed for promoting Theory of Mind (ToM) skills in children aged 7/8; and (2) the relations between second-order recursive thinking (II-order-RT), advanced-ToM (Adv_ToM) and metacognition. Ninety-one 7- to 8-year-old children were assigned to one of three training conditions:…

This study aims to track college students' on-task rate during the teaching process and to analyze the influence of instructional strategies on on-task rate through the aspects of observable and internal engagement indicators. Thirty-six undergraduate students at a higher education institution in China participated in the study. Students'…

This article provides guidelines for an entry-level course that prepares psychology students and practitioners to acquire entry-level skills, abilities, knowledge, and attitudes important to the individual assessment of intellectual abilities of children and youth. The article reviews prominent international, regional, and national policies,…

Early Alert Systems (EAS) play a fundamental role in education by supporting the learning process and evaluating student performance. In this study, an innovative EAS designed to specifically identify weaknesses in Cognitive Skills (CS) in first-year higher education students is presented, focusing on a challenging course at a South American…