The changing academic priorities of universities are often discussed but little investigated by social scientists: What accounts for the striking expansions and contractions in disciplinary fields over time? Focusing specifically on the natural sciences, this article articulates a global-institutional argument that holds that deep shifts in…

This paper presents a synthesis of what is currently known about the nature and development of scientific reasoning and why it plays a central role in acquiring scientific literacy. Science is viewed as a hypothetico-deductive (HD) enterprise engaging in the generation and test of alternative explanations. Explanation generation and test requires…

Patients with corticobasal degeneration (CBD) appear to have impaired number knowledge. We examined the nature of their number deficit while we tested the hypothesis that comprehension of larger numbers depends in part on verbal mediation. We evaluated magnitude judgments and performance on number conservation measures rooted in Piagetian theory…

Models of speech production disagree on whether or not homonyms have a shared word-form representation. To investigate this issue, a picture-naming experiment was carried out using Dutch homonyms of which both meanings could be presented as a picture. Naming latencies for the low-frequency meanings of homonyms were slower than for those of the…

In two human skin conductance conditioning experiments we investigated whether processing of stimulus compounds can be influenced by past experience. Participants were either pre-trained with a discrimination problem that could be solved elementally (A+, B-, AB+, C- in Experiment 1 and A+, AB+, C-, CB- in Experiment 2) or one that required a…

Mirror neurons, first described in the rostral part of monkey ventral premotor cortex (area F5), discharge both when the animal performs a goal-directed hand action and when it observes another individual performing the same or a similar action. More recently, in the same area mirror neurons responding to the observation of mouth actions have been…

When people engage in conversation, they tailor their utterances to their conversational partners, whether these partners are other humans or computational systems. This tailoring, or adaptation to the partner takes place in all facets of human language use, and is based on a "mental model" or a "user model" of the conversational partner. Such…

Straub "et al." ("2002") recently identified the 6p22.3 gene dysbindin (DTNBP1) through positional cloning as a schizophrenia susceptibility gene. We studied a rare cohort of 102 children with onset of psychosis before age 13. Standardized ratings of early development, medication response, neuropsychological and cognitive performance, premorbid…

Spearman's ''Law of Diminishing Returns'' (SLODR) predicts that "g" saturation for cognitive tests will be lower at high ability levels than at low ability levels. This hypothesis was tested in two large samples of Danish military draftees (n=33,833 and n=25,020). The subjects were representative samples of the young adult male…

This study explored evidence of the construct validity of the interest scales on the Campbell Interest and Skill Survey (CISS; Campbell, Hyne, & Nilsen, 1992) by testing evidence for convergent validity with the Strong Interest Inventory (SII; Hansen & Campbell, 1985). Two hypotheses were formulated. First, matching CISS and SII scales…

A conceptual framework for assessing student motivation and self-regulated learning in the college classroom is presented. The framework is based on a self-regulatory (SRL) perspective on student motivation and learning in contrast to a student approaches to learning (SAL) perspective. The differences between SRL and SAL approaches are discussed,…

Interactions among the imagination, expertise reversal, and element interactivity effects were investigated in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, less knowledgeable primary school students learning to use a bus timetable produced better performance under study than imagination conditions, but an increase in their experience reversed the result,…

This paper describes an interactive activity developed for illustrating hypothesis tests on the mean for paired or matched samples. The activity is extended to illustrate assessing normality, the Wilcoxon signed rank test, Kaplan-Meier survival functions, two-way analysis of variance, and the randomized block design. (Contains 6 tables and 13…

A serendipitous finding involving static magnetic fields can be used to design experiments suitable for both science and nonscience majors. It has been reported that organisms respond differently to high-gauss magnetic fields generated by north poles than they do to those generated by south poles. Experimental tests of this hypothesis are ideal…

An inquiry-based laboratory course was created in an effort to increase student responsibility in learning and to improve teaching in areas related to molecular medicine. Authentic medical cases with both scientific and clinical aspects formed the basis of a project-oriented course that also included student laboratory work focused on the…