Grounded in our work on designing game-based curriculum, this paper begins with a theoretical articulation of transformational play. Students who play transformationally become protagonists who use the knowledge, skills, and concepts of the educational content to first make sense of a situation and then make choices that actually transform the…

Game technology has been widely used for educational applications, however, despite the common use of background music in games, its effect on learning has been largely unexplored. This paper discusses how music played in the background of a computer-animated history lesson affected participants' memory for facts. A virtual history lesson was…

Many schools across the United States and Canada are now implementing response-to-intervention (RTI) as a means to address the needs of students who struggle with reading, writing, or math by using dual discrepancy (i.e., low ability and little to no progress over time with targeted intervention programming) as a means to classify for learning…

The language of "faith-learning integration" remains popular among evangelical educators in both K-12 and higher education. Some observers suggest for theological and educational reasons that Christian educators replace integration language with other language. Even its advocates do not agree on what would count as integration. This article…

Good mentoring depends on effective learning. Effective learning depends on the readiness, willingness, and openness of mentoring partners. The concept of mentoring as a partnership does not come easy to many who experience mentoring through the lens of the traditional paradigm that focused on an older, more experienced person passing on knowledge…

In two experiments, we investigated the relative impact of causal beliefs and empirical evidence on both decision making and causal judgments, and whether this relative impact could be altered by previous experience. 2. Selected groups of participants in both experiments received pre-training with either causal or neutral cues, or no pre-training…

Contemporary research on meta-cognition has reintroduced conscious experience into psychological research on learning and stimulated a fresh look at classical experiential learning scholars who gave experience a central role in the learning process--William James, John Dewey, Kurt Lewin, Carl Rogers, and Paulo Freire. In particular James's…

Piaget proposed that understanding permanency, understanding occlusion events, and forming mental representations were synonymous; however, accumulating evidence indicates that those concepts are "not" unified in development. Infants reach for endarkened objects at younger ages than for occluded objects, and infants' looking patterns suggest that…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of instruments defined as artefacts, rules, models or norms, in the articulation between knowing-in-practice and knowledge, in learning processes. Design/methodology/approach: The paper focuses on a distributed, knowledge-intensive and instrumented activity at the core of any collective…

Besides traditional supervised classification learning, people can learn categories by inferring the missing features of category members. It has been proposed that feature inference learning promotes learning a category's internal structure (e.g., its typical features and interfeature correlations) whereas classification promotes the learning of…

Assessments associated with learning progressions are designed to provide diagnostic information about the level and nature of student understanding. Valid interpretations of such diagnoses are only possible when students consistently express the ideas associated with a single learning progression level. Latent class analysis was employed to…

Two studies were conducted to test the central claim of the self-teaching hypothesis (i.e., phonological recoding is necessary for orthographic learning) in silent reading. The first study aimed to demonstrate the use of phonological recoding during silent reading. Texts containing pseudowords were read silently or aloud. Two days later, target…

A key aspect of the acquisition of grammar for second language learners involves learning how to make appropriate connections between grammatical forms and the meanings which they typically signal. We argue that learning form/function mappings involves three interrelated principles. The first is the Given-to-New Principle, where existing world…

Increased emotionality is a characteristic of human adolescence, but its animal models are limited. Here we report that generalization of auditory conditioned fear between a conditional stimulus (CS+) and a novel auditory stimulus is stronger in 4-5-wk-old mice (juveniles) than in their 9-10-wk-old counterparts (adults), whereas nonassociative…

Numerous studies over the past decade support the claim that infants are equipped with powerful statistical language learning mechanisms. The primary evidence for statistical language learning in word segmentation comes from studies using artificial languages, continuous streams of synthesized syllables that are highly simplified relative to real…