One important function of categories is to permit rich inductive inferences. Prior work shows that children use category labels to guide their inductive inferences. However, there are competing theories to explain this phenomenon, differing in the roles attributed to conceptual information vs. perceptual similarity. Seven experiments with 4- to…

This study is part of ongoing research in undergraduate mathematics education. The study was guided by the belief that understanding the mental constructions the pre-service teachers make when learning matrix algebra concepts leads to improved instructional methods. In this preliminary study the data was collected from 85 pre-service teachers…

As part of the No Child Left behind Act of 2001 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004, schools are called upon to provide students with academic instruction using scientific, research-based methods whenever possible. One of these supposed research-based methods is a program by the name of Brain Gym®. Brain Gym® is…

Multiple intelligence is the theory that "people are smart in more ways than one has immense implication for educators". Howard Gardner proposed a new view of intelligence that is rapidly being incorporated in school curricula. In his theory of Multiple Intelligences, Gardner expanded the concept of intelligence with such areas as music,…

Different lines of research suggest that our mental representations of time and space are linked, though the strength of this linkage has only recently been addressed for the front-back mental timeline (Eikmeier, Schröter, Maienborn, Alex-Ruf, & Ulrich, 2013). The present study extends this investigation to the left-right mental timeline. In…

A number of studies have shown that visual working memory (WM) is poorer for complex versus simple items, traditionally accounted for by higher information load placing greater demands on encoding and storage capacity limits. Other research suggests that it may not be complexity that determines WM performance per se, but rather increased…

The dual mechanisms of control framework postulates that cognitive control can operate in 2 distinct modes: a "proactive" preparatory mode and a "reactive" wait-and-see mode. Importantly, the 2 modes are associated with both costs and benefits in cognitive performance. Here we explore this framework, in terms of its…

Proactive interference (PI) refers to the finding that memory for recently studied (target) material can be impaired by the prior study of other (nontarget) material. Previous accounts of PI differed in whether they attributed PI to impaired retrieval or impaired encoding. Here, we suggest an integrated encoding-retrieval account, which assigns a…

In this commentary on Van Leeuwen (2015, this issue), I explore the relation between theory and practice in learning analytics. Specifically, I caution against adhering to one specific theoretical doctrine while ignoring others, suggest deeper applications of cognitive load theory to understanding teaching with analytics tools, and comment on…

Previous work has shown that the presence of examples may lead to cryptomnesia, or inadvertent plagiarism, on creative tasks. Various experiential and environmental attributes may magnify this finding. For instance, novices, with limited knowledge, may be more prone to inadvertently plagiarize examples, and increases in cognitive load may result…

By varying the probabilities that a stimulus would appear at particular times after the presentation of a cue and modeling the data by the theory of visual attention (Bundesen, 1990), Vangkilde, Coull, and Bundesen (2012) provided evidence that the speed of encoding a singly presented stimulus letter into visual short-term memory (VSTM) is…

The aim of the current study is to investigate motion event cognition in second language learners in a higher education context. Based on recent findings that speakers of grammatical aspect languages like English attend less to the endpoint (goal) of events than do speakers of nonaspect languages like Swedish in a nonverbal categorization task…

Sign- and goal-tracking are differentially associated with drug abuse-related behavior. Recently, it has been hypothesized that sign- and goal-tracking behavior are mediated by different neurobehavioral valuation systems, including differential incentive salience attribution. Herein, we used different conditioned stimuli to preferentially elicit…

Most distributed and virtual online environments for and pedagogies of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) neglect the social and social-emotional aspects underlying the group dynamics of learning and working in a CSCL group. These group dynamics often determine whether the group will develop into a well-performing team and whether a…

Extensive reading (ER) has been implemented under a wide variety of names, such as "(uninterrupted) sustained silent reading," "free voluntary reading," "pleasure reading," "book flood," "independent reading," and "Drop Everything And Read (DEAR)"; its various names emphasize different…