Infants start to interpret completed human actions as goal-directed in the second half of the first year of life. In a series of three studies, the understanding of a goal-directed but uncompleted action was investigated in 6- and 9-month-old infants using a preferential looking paradigm. Infants saw the video of an actor's reaching movement…

In this article, Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan argue that "disciplinary literacy"--advanced literacy instruction embedded within content-area classes such as math, science, and social studies--should be a focus of middle and secondary school settings. Moving beyond the oft-cited "every teacher a teacher of reading" philosophy…

Mediation and moderation are two theories for refining and understanding a causal relationship. Empirical investigation of mediators and moderators requires an integrated research design rather than the data analyses driven approach often seen in the literature. This paper described the conceptual foundation, research design, data analysis, as…

It has been repeatedly shown that in decisions under time constraints, individuals predominantly use noncompensatory strategies rather than complex compensatory ones. The authors argue that these findings might be due not to limitations of cognitive capacity but instead to limitations of information search imposed by the commonly used experimental…

Knowledge transfer and exchange is the process of increasing the awareness and use of research evidence in policy or practice decision making by nonresearch audiences or stakeholders. One way to accomplish this end is through ongoing interaction between researchers and interested nonresearch audiences, which provides an opportunity for the two…

Reviews two types of multiple scoring practices and discusses how multiple scoring affects inferences. Multiple scoring uses a single observation as evidence for making inferences about an examinee's competence in multiple assessment units. Summarizes key implications of multiple scoring. (SLD)

Places the insights of P. Games (1971) in the context of the major developments in simultaneous and sequential inference since his article was written. The focus is on the common multiple-comparison procedure scenarios of orthogonal and nonorthogonal contrasts, all possible pairwise comparisons, and exploratory post hoc contrasts. Contains 80…

Deontic assertions concern what one ought to do, may do, and ought not to do. This paper proposes a theory of their meanings and of how these meanings are represented in mental models. The meanings of deontic assertions refer to sets of permissible and impermissible states. An experiment corroborated the ability of individuals to list these…

The purpose of this article was to establish how theoretical category knowledge-specifically, knowledge of the causal relations that link the features of categories-supports the ability to infer the presence of unobserved features. Our experiments were designed to test proposals that causal knowledge is represented psychologically as Bayesian…

Causal reasoning is the core and basis of cognition about the objective world. This experiment studied the development of causal reasoning in 86 3.5-4.5-year-olds using a ramp apparatus with two input holes and two output holes [Frye, D., Zelazo, P. D., & Palfai, T. (1995). Theory of mind and rule-based reasoning. Cognitive Development 10,…

Informal reasoning typically draws on a wider range of inferential behaviour than is measured by traditional inference tasks. In this paper, we developed several tasks to study informal reasoning with two novel types of conditional statements: Persuasions (e.g., if the Kyoto accord is ratified, greenhouse gas emissions will be reduced) and…

The discovery of conjunctive causes--factors that act in concert to produce or prevent an effect--has been explained by purely covariational theories. Such theories assume that concomitant variations in observable events directly license causal inferences, without postulating the existence of unobservable causal relations. This article discusses…

This study analyzed the factors that affect student participation in discussion forum under the two main purposes. The first purpose was to examine the relationship between the students' individual demographics and categories of students' participation level (inactive, moderate, and active) in discussion forum of an online course. The second…

There is often confusion about distinctions between growth models and value-added models. The first half of this paper attempts to dispel some of these confusions by clarifying terminology and illustrating by example how the results from a large-scale assessment can and will be used to make inferences about student growth and the value-added…

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the authors consider how parental education relates to four separate outcomes in the children's generation: education, lifetime earnings, health and (financial) wealth. They relate parents' educational ranks to children's ranks on these four outcomes. By focusing on ranks, they are able to see…