Evolutionary theory explains a wide range of biological phenomena. Proper understanding of evolutionary mechanisms such as natural selection is therefore an essential goal for biology education. Unfortunately, natural selection has time and again proven difficult to teach and learn, and students' resulting understanding is often characterized by…

Children with dyslexia face persistent difficulties in acquiring reading skills, often making guessing errors characterized by the replacement of a word by an orthographic neighbour. These reading errors could be related to inhibition problems within the reading task. Previous studies examining inhibition skills in dyslexic children led to unclear…

The purpose of this study is to develop a thinking process model that reveals cognitive bias through analyzing students' cognitive biases in processing experimental manuals. Twenty-two college students participated in the study. During the "making electromagnets" experimental activity, we collected students' concurrent verbal protocols,…

People are routinely involved in remembering the national past and imagining the national future, especially when making political decisions. These processes, however, have not been explored extensively. The present research aims to address this lacuna. In 2 experiments (N = 203), participants were asked to remember and imagine events that involve…

Students often use incoherent strategies in their problem solving involving force and motion, as revealed, e.g. when they are asked to draw force diagrams for amusement rides involving circular motion, whether in horizontal or vertical planes. Depending on the questions asked, assignments involving circular motion can reveal different types of…

In randomized experiments, inventories with reverse-keyed items are compared with inventories in which all the items are either positively or negatively associated with the underlying concept. The results show that with reverse keying, a control of the potential bias was not sufficient; likewise, the factorial structure, reliability, and validity…

Mathematics education scholars have generally classified students' conception of the equal sign as either operational or relational. Adding to these conceptions, Jones (2008) introduced the idea of substitutional conception. Building off these scholars, I introduce a form of understanding the equal sign that includes a transformative equivalence…

This quantitative study examined the relationship between well-being and stages of the creative process, including problem identification and construction, idea generation, and idea evaluation among gifted young adults (n = 173). A sample of college honors students responded to multiple measures of well-being, creative problem-solving tasks, the…

For centuries, adults may have relied on pedagogies that promote rote memory for the learning of foreign languages through word associations and grammar rules. This contrasts sharply with child language learning which unfolds in socially interactive contexts. In this paper, we advocate an approach to study the social brain of language by grounding…

In recent years, virtual reality (VR) technology has been widely available for psychological research in spatial cognition. Studies focusing on the training and testing of navigational and wayfinding skills are increasingly using virtual environment (VE) paradigms, which offer significant benefits in experimental control, ecological validity, and…

Purpose: Universities and higher education institutions (HEIs) are increasingly recognizing the value of coaching for professional and organizational development. This study is designed to investigate whether Cognitive Coaching, implemented as a programme in an HEI in Oman, made any difference to the behaviour and attitudes of employees holding…

Students may exhibit two forms of cognitive biases, belief and hindsight bias, in evaluating a scientific experiment. Counter to disagreement, they may only believe an outcome that agrees with their belief to be more predictable in hindsight than foresight. The focus of this research is on the relationship between these biases. Students were…

In educational research, interesting but irrelevant materials are often considered seductive details, which are suspected to have detrimental effects on learning. Although seductive details have been mostly examined in the context of text comprehension, such elements are also used in graphs (e.g., depicting data points). In the present experiment,…

Bilingualism has been observed to influence cognitive processing across the lifespan but whether bilingual environments have an effect on selective attention and attention strategies in infancy remains an unresolved question. In Study 1, infants exposed to monolingual or bilingual environments participated in an eye-tracking cueing task in which…

A Chaldean Catholic immigrant mother from Iraq kept a journal about how her Arab American daughters (ages 9 and 15) visited museums for the first time and participated in museum-related activities that focused on them (1) understanding and developing empathy for all new immigrants coming to the U.S.; (2) understanding and developing appreciation…