This article presents an activity that engages students in a fun and collaborative process of learning, with a primary objective of teaching them how to identify and label formal and informal argumentative fallacies. After playing a variation of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?," students ought to be better prepared to craft stronger arguments and…

Children acquire general knowledge about many kinds of things, but there are few known means by which this knowledge is acquired. In this article, it is proposed that children acquire generic knowledge by sharing in pretend play. In Experiment 1, twenty-two 3- to 4-year-olds watched pretense in which a puppet represented a "nerp" (an unfamiliar…

To be outdoors and involved in adventures concerns the movement between safety and risk, the familiar and the unfamiliar. Deep involvement in activities and the seriousness found in play are essential in "Bildung." Findings in this paper stem from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a kayak community, between late autumn 2006 until the…

Vocal stereotypy is a common problem behavior in individuals with autism spectrum disorders that may interfere considerably with learning and social inclusion. To assist clinicians in treating the behavior and to guide researchers in identifying gaps in the research literature, the authors provide an overview of research on vocal stereotypy in…

This article presents the authors' response to Michael Newman's "Calling Transformative Learning into Question: Some Mutinous Thoughts". The authors begin by noting their appreciation of Michael Newman's challenge to transformative learning theory. In their response, the authors review and comment on the fatal flaws presented by Newman and then…

Introduction: The following study investigates relationships between spaced practice (re-studying after a delay) and transfer of learning. Specifically, the impact on learners ability to transfer learning after participating in spaced model-building or unstructured study of narrated text. Method: Subjects were randomly assigned either to a…

Just as students need plenty of time to practice skills such as solving fraction problems, they also need time to practice the skills of discourse to become better communicators and stronger mathematicians. Embedded within discourse strategies are specific ways to maximize communication. When repeatedly practiced, students learn to listen to one…

Recent studies have suggested that educators should avoid concrete instantiations when the goal is to promote transfer. However, concrete instantiations may benefit transfer in the long run, particularly if they are "faded" into more abstract instantiations. Undergraduates were randomly assigned to learn a mathematical concept in one of three…

It has become commonplace to ask, whenever anything has gone wrong, what lessons can be learned from the experience. But the appearance of open-endedness in that question is misleading: not every answer that we could give to it is acceptable. There are, in the context of such a question, tacit constraints in what counts as a valid lesson to be…

In this article we employ whiteness as a conceptual framework to contextualize how faculty develop and implement, and consequently how students experience, service learning. A vignette that illustrates the pervasiveness of whiteness in service learning is followed by an analysis that details how whiteness frames the teaching and learning in this…

In humans and in animals, mental schemas can store information within an associative framework that enables rapid and efficient assimilation of new information. Using a hippocampal-dependent paired-associate task, we now report that the anterior cingulate cortex is part of a neocortical network of schema storage with NMDA receptor-mediated…

Gravity affects everything we do. Only in very recent years have we been able to carry out experiments in orbit around the Earth and see for the first time how things behave in its absence. This has allowed us to understand fundamental processes better and to design new materials using this knowledge. (Contains 6 figures.)

Retrieval dynamics in context-dependent recall were explored via manipulations of external and internal context in two experiments. Participants were tested in either the same or different context as the material was learned in and correct recalls, errors, and recall latency measures were examined. In both experiments changes in context resulted…

This article introduces a line of research on distributed educational influence (DEI) that has recently been developed by the research group to which the authors belong. The main hypothesis is that in computer-supported collaborative learning contexts, all participants are potential sources of educational influence (EI). According to this…

Since 1950s, teaching machines have changed a lot. Today, we have different ideas about how people learn, what instructor should do to help students during their learning process. We have adaptive learning technologies that can create much more student oriented learning environments. The purpose of this article is to present these changes and its…