As the use of educational technology becomes more ubiquitous, an enormous amount of learning process data is being produced. Educational data mining seeks to analyze and model these data, with the ultimate goal of improving learning outcomes. The most firmly grounded and rigorous evaluation of an educational data mining discovery is whether it…

Purpose: This study aims to explore how the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model (2000) is used to categorize students' and teachers' interactions in an asynchronous discussion and how these interactions are able to help students add quality to their narrative writing. Design/methodology/approach: The interactions were categorized based on teaching,…

This pilot study investigated the efficacy of Qigong Sensory Training, a parent-implemented tactile intervention, in improving sensory processing and self-regulation in children with or at-risk for autism who were enrolled in early intervention. A pretest-posttest, single-subject design was implemented with three families. After 5 months, atypical…

In the beginning of the 21st century, creativity has been highly esteemed not only in the arts and sciences, but also in economy, politics, and individual welfare. Most theories and practical applications stem from individual sciences and frequently conclude with generalizations that cannot be derived from the specific scientific paradigm. It…

Providing prompts to induce focused processing of the central contents of instructional explanations is a promising instructional means to support novice learners in learning from instructional explanations. However, within research on the expertise reversal effect it has been shown that instructional means that are beneficial for novices can be…

Individual differences in mind wandering and reading comprehension were examined in the current study. In particular, individual differences in mind wandering, working memory capacity, interest in the current topic, motivation to do well on the task, and topic experience and their relations with reading comprehension were examined in the current…

Transferring one's knowledge in new situations is usually associated with cognitively demanding processes. The paper explores an approach to facilitating transfer of knowledge by explicitly instructing learners in medium-level generalized but yet domain-connected knowledge structures that are applicable to a broader range of tasks in the…

Atypical auditory perception is a widely recognised but poorly understood feature of autism. In the current study, we used magnetoencephalography to measure the brain responses of 10 autistic children as they listened passively to dichotic pitch stimuli, in which an illusory tone is generated by sub-millisecond inter-aural timing differences in…

Many experiments provide evidence that practicing retrieval benefits retention relative to conditions of no retrieval practice. Nearly all prior research has employed retrieval practice requiring overt responses, but a few experiments have shown that covert retrieval also produces retention advantages relative to control conditions. However,…

Ideomotor theory considers bidirectional action-effect associations to be the fundamental building blocks for intentional action. The present study employed a novel pupillometric and oculomotor paradigm to study developmental changes in the role of action-effects in the acquisition of voluntary action. Our findings suggest that both 7- and…

For over 30 years, researchers have investigated students' ideas about energy with the intent of reforming instructional practice. In this pursuit, Watts contributed an influential study with his 1983 paper "Some alternative views of energy" ["Phys. Educ." 18, 213 (1983)]. Watts' "alternative frameworks"…

Two studies examined young children's early understanding and evaluation of truth telling and lying and the role that factuality plays in their judgments. Study 1 (one hundred four 2- to 5-year-olds) found that even the youngest children reliably accepted true statements and rejected false statements and that older children's ability to…

Young children spend a large portion of their time pretending about non-real situations. Why? We answer this question by using the framework of Bayesian causal models to argue that pretending and counterfactual reasoning engage the same component cognitive abilities: disengaging with current reality, making inferences about an alternative…

The ability to imagine objects undergoing rotation (mental rotation) improves markedly with practice, but an explanation of this plasticity remains controversial. Some researchers propose that practice speeds up the rate of a general-purpose rotation algorithm. Others maintain that performance improvements arise through the adoption of a new…

Background: To assess the hypothesis that in a sample of very healthy elderly men selected to minimize risk for Alzheimer's disease (AD) and cerebrovascular disease, myelin breakdown in late-myelinating regions mediates age-related slowing in cognitive processing speed (CPS). Materials and methods: The prefrontal lobe white matter and the genu of…