The major focus of this ethnographic study is devoted to exploring the confluence of global and local referents of science education in the context of an urban chemistry laboratory classroom taught by a first-generation Filipino-American male teacher. This study investigates encounters between the teacher and four second-generation immigrant…

Contemporary instructional approaches expect students to be active producers of knowledge. This leads to the need for creation of instructional tools and tasks that can offer students opportunities for active learning. This study examines the effect of a computational experiment as an instructional tool-for Grade 12 students, using a computer…

Psychologists have long been intrigued with the rationales that underlie our decisions. Similarly, the concept of conditioned reinforcement has a venerable history, particularly in accounting for behavior not obviously maintained by primary reinforcers. The studies of choice and of conditioned reinforcement have often developed in lockstep. Many…

Recent behavioral, neuroimaging, and neurophysiological research suggests a common representational code mediating the observation and execution of actions; yet, the nature of this representational code is not well understood. The authors address this question by investigating (a) whether this observation-execution matching system (or mirror…

In current cognitive psychology, naming latencies are commonly measured by electronic voice keys that detect when sound exceeds a certain amplitude threshold. However, recent research (e.g., K. Rastle & M. H. Davis, 2002) has shown that these devices are particularly inaccurate in precisely detecting acoustic onsets. In this article, the authors…

In 5 experiments, the authors examined the development of automatic response inhibition in the go/no-go paradigm and a modified version of the stop-signal paradigm. They hypothesized that automatic response inhibition may develop over practice when stimuli are consistently associated with stopping. All 5 experiments consisted of a training phase…

Affordances--possibilities for action--are constrained by the match between actors and their environments. For motor decisions to be adaptive, affordances must be detected accurately. Three experiments examined the correspondence between motor decisions and affordances as participants reached through apertures of varying size. A psychophysical…

Eye movements were monitored in 4 experiments that explored the role of parafoveal word length in reading. The experiments employed a type of compound word where the deletion of a letter results in 2 short words (e.g., backhand, back and). The boundary technique (K. Rayner, 1975) was employed to manipulate word length information in the parafovea.…

A chemical fountain, constructed from several vertically stacked plastic champagne cups, is used to demonstrate acid-base and chemiluminescence reactions. (Contains 1 figure.)

Qualitative analysis of inorganic salts and mixtures is an essential experiment carried out in high school, undergraduate, and postgraduate levels all over the world especially in India and South Asia. The classical technique uses H[subscript 2]S, which is highly toxic and has adverse effects on humans and the environment. Increasing awareness…

This experiment is designed to expose undergraduate students to the process of selective etching by using soft lithography and the resulting electrical properties of multilayered films fabricated via self-assembly of gold nanoparticles. Students fabricate a conductive film of gold on glass, apply a patterned resist using a polydimethylsiloxane…

What are the factors that influence everyday attributions of cause and blame? The current studies focus on sequences of events that lead to adverse outcomes, and examine people's cause and blame ratings for key events in these sequences. Experiment 1 manipulated the intentional status of candidate causes and their location in a causal chain.…

The authors present a classroom experiment designed to illustrate key concepts of third-degree price discrimination. By participating as buyers and sellers, students actively learn (1) how group pricing differs from uniform pricing, (2) how resale between buyers limits a seller's ability to price discriminate, and (3) how preventing price…

In the ordered RNR/RNN serial pattern task, rats often reduce their running speeds on trial 2 less within the RNR than within the RNN series. Initially, investigators (Capaldi, 1985; Capaldi et al., 1983) considered this trial 2 differential speed effect evidence for rats' anticipation of inter-trial outcomes within each series. Later findings,…

How do lay individuals think about the objectivity of their ethical beliefs? Do they regard them as factual and objective, or as more subjective and opinion-based, and what might predict such differences? In three experiments, we set out a methodology for assessing the perceived objectivity of ethical beliefs, and use it to document several novel…