Decomposition theories of morphological processing in visual word recognition posit an early morpho-orthographic parser that is blind to semantic information, whereas parallel distributed processing (PDP) theories assume that the transparency of orthographic-semantic relationships influences processing from the beginning. To test these…

Proportional reasoning is important to the field of mathematics education because it lies at the crossroads of additive reasoning in the elementary school and multiplicative reasoning needed for more advanced mathematics. This research reports on the representations used by pre-service teachers (PSTs) as they responded to tasks involving…

School discipline remains authoritarian in the USA despite the superficial adoption of student-centered, constructivist lesson delivery. The issue may be lack of ideas for how to conduct constructivist discipline. Three novel activities are presented for classroom discipline that may close this gap. All three present discipline in a manner that is…

This chapter sets out various methods for gathering important data on the language uses of participants in a research project. These methods imply interaction between students, teachers and researchers. They are used in the design of research projects based on action research, ethnography or conversational analysis, this being the case with the…

Improvements in cognitive flexibility during the preschool years have been linked to developments in both working memory and inhibitory control, though the precise contribution of each remains unclear. In the current study, one hundred and twenty 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds completed two rule-switching tasks. In one version, children switched rules in…

Four tasks (N = 191, 3- to 6-year-olds) examined the effect of instrumental versus conventional language cues on children's imitative fidelity of a necklace-making activity, their memory and transmission of the activity, and their perceptions of functional fixedness. Children in the conventional condition imitated with higher fidelity, transmitted…

Young children's social learning is a topic of great interest. Here, we examined preschoolers' (M = 52.44 months, SD = 9.7 months) help-seeking as a social information gathering activity that may optimize and support children's opportunities for learning. In a toy assembly task, we assessed each child's competency at assembling toys and the…

The ability to attend to one among multiple sources of information is central to everyday functioning. Just as central is the ability to switch attention among competing inputs as the task at hand changes. Such processes develop surprisingly slowly, such that even into adolescence, we remain slower and more error prone at switching among tasks…

Mutual exclusivity (ME) refers to the assumption that there are one-to-one relations between linguistic forms and their meanings. It is used as a word-learning strategy whereby children tend to map novel labels to unfamiliar rather than familiar referents. Previous research has indicated a relation between ME and vocabulary development, which…

One of the first challenges facing the young language learner is the task of segmenting words from a natural language speech stream, without prior knowledge of how these words sound. Studies with younger children find that children find it easier to segment words from fluent speech when the words are presented in infant-directed speech, i.e., the…

A mysterious conflict of solutions emerged when a group of tenth- and eleventh-grade students were studying a seemingly ordinary problem on combination and probability. By investigating the mysterious "conflicts" caused by multiple randomization procedures, students will gain a deeper understanding of what it means to perform a task…

In this qualitative research, we studied difficulties that undergraduate students face while learning the concept of inner product space. Participants were 35 first-year mathematics students from Yildiz Technical University in the 2011 and 2012 academic years. We asked participants to solve 5 inner product space questions. Data were jointly…

Learners with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often struggle with learning new skills or behaviors, especially when these behaviors are complex or have multiple components. Task analysis (TA) can be used to help break down and teach these chained behaviors. Chained behaviors are behaviors or skills which consist of multiple steps such as tying…

Purpose: This study examined bilinguals' performance on functional executive function map tasks such as the Zoo Map from the Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome and the extent to which working memory, set-shifting, and inhibition measures predicted bilinguals' performance on these tasks. Additionally, we explored the utility of…

There is emerging evidence that collocation use plays a primary role in determining various dimensions of L2 oral proficiency assessment and development. The current study presents the results of three experiments which examined the relationship between the degree of association in collocation use (operationalized as t scores and mutual…