Background: If a clinician has to make decisions on diagnosis and treatment, he or she is confronted with a variety of causal theories. In order to compare these theories a neutral terminology and notational system is needed. The Causal Modelling framework involving three levels of description--biological, cognitive and behavioural--has previously…

It is hypothesized that there is a pervasive and fundamental bias in humans' understanding of physical causation: Once the roles of cause and effect are assigned to objects in interactions, people tend to overestimate the strength and importance of the causal object and underestimate that of the effect object in bringing about the outcome. This…

The task of causal learning concerns figuring out the laws that govern how the world works. The goal of a reasoner who engages in this task is to gain an understanding of the empirical world that would guide decisions regarding actions to achieve the reasoner's objectives. The comments by P. A. White and C. Luhmann and W.-k. Ahn on P. W. Cheng and…

The topic of "truncation by death" in randomized experiments arises in many fields, such as medicine, economics and education. Traditional approaches addressing this issue ignore the fact that the outcome after the truncation is neither "censored" nor "missing," but should be treated as being defined on an extended sample space. Using an…

Counterfactuals are routinely used in physical and biological sciences to develop and evaluate sophisticated, non-linear models. They have been used with telling effect in the study of economic history and American politics. For some historians, counterfactual arguments have no scholarly standing. They consider them flights of fancy, fun over a…

Grading is one of the least liked, least understood and least considered aspects of teaching. After years of work, we have developed a grading system that is quite different from traditional and reformed approaches to grading and which meaningfully incorporates and integrates the collection of evidence, the evaluation of evidence, and the…

A review of studies published between 1980 and 2005 shows a significant positive effect of specialized training on the competency of caregivers in childcare (d=0.45, S.E.=0.10). Experimental results from the meta-analysis were significantly smaller for settings with no fixed curriculum content, delivery of the training at multiple sites and…

A framework is proposed in which on-line activities occurring during comprehension are explicitly tied to the memory representation of a story. The framework, referred to as the "landscape" framework, is used to implement a process model that assumes that readers attempt to explain story events in terms of their causal antecedents. An…

The terms "causal-comparative" and "correlational" are dated and misleading and suggest a false dichotomy in research. Textbook authors should stop misleading educational research students and researchers in training with the notion that causal-comparative research provides better evidence for causality than correlational research. They should…

The understanding of cause and effect situations is described in terms of the construction of a generative mental model and is exemplified through instances from science teaching. The absence of understanding is described in terms of failure of construction, reconstruction, or allied processes. (Author/SLD)

Tests theoretical and developmental models of the causal ordering between academic self-concept and academic achievement. The structural equation model for the total sample supported a reciprocal-effects model, indicating that achievement has an effect on self-concept and that academic self-concept has an effect on achievement. (Contains 33…

Implications of phase space functions for psychological assessment are examined in this third article of the special section. The ability to predict the future time course of variables and the strength of causal relationships can be enhanced if temporal, dynamic, and nonlinear characteristics of variables are considered. (SLD)

It is argued that the study of one important aspect of intelligence, creativity, can be furthered by the introduction of causal theories and their experimental study. Purely correlational investigations are a useful beginning, but psychology can only acquire true scientific stature by combining correlational and experimental approaches. (SLD)

Evaluates a model exploring the mitigating effects of three types of explanations on subjects' negative reactions when told they had been deceived. Explanations were found to mitigate differentially feelings of disapproval, injustice, blame, and unforgiveness, depending on the type of explanation, the severity of outcome, the explanation's…

Cross-lagged methodology (CLM), which is virtually ignored by psychological researchers, is suggested for studies of causal relations in which controlled experimentation is unfeasible. The longitudinal facet in the design of CLM is highlighted. Advantages and limitations of the CLM are described. (SLD)