Appropriate behavior in relation to an object often requires judging whether it is owned and, if so, by whom. The authors propose accounts of how people make these judgments. Our central claim is that both judgments often involve making inferences about object history. In judging whether objects are owned, people may assume that artifacts (e.g.,…

In this essay, I attempt to interpret the educational philosophy of John Dewey in a way that accomplishes two goals. The first of these is to avoid any reference to Dewey as a propagator of a particular scientific method or to any of the individualist and cognitivist ideas that is sometimes associated with him. Secondly, I want to overcome the…

It has been common to use video records of instruction in teacher professional development, but participants have rarely been encouraged to evaluate teachers and students' actions in those records, allegedly because evaluation deters from the development of a professional discourse. In this study, we inspected teachers' online discussions of…

Since the author began work in reflective practice, at first informally in the late 1970s and then more formally in the mid-1980s, he has always looked at reflective practice as a compass of sorts to guide teachers when they may be seeking direction as to what they are doing in their classrooms. The metaphor of reflection as a compass enables…

Developing critical literacy skills in students from an early age is vital and should be every teacher's goal. When students are taught how to evaluate a text in critical terms, they are empowered to consider and analyze the influences that are shaping their thoughts and ideas. Strong critical thinking skills enable students to question and…

This study used think-aloud methodology to investigate 51 Norwegian undergraduates' topic-specific epistemic cognition while working with six documents presenting conflicting views on the issue of cell phones and potential health risks. Results showed that students' epistemic cognition was represented by one dimension concerning the certainty and…

Four-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults were asked to make judgments about the reality status of four different types of machines: real machines that children and adults interact with on a daily basis, real machines that children and adults interact with rarely (if at all), and impossible machines that violated a real-world physical or biological…

This research applied social domain theory to illuminate reasoning about the perceived legitimacy and limits of group decision making (majority rule) among adolescents from urban and rural China (N = 160). Study 1 revealed that adolescents from both urban and rural China judged group decision making as acceptable for both social conventional and…

Children's, adolescents', and adults' (N = 96 7-8, 10-11, and 13-14-year-olds and university students) epistemological development and its relation to judgments and reasoning about teaching methods was examined. The domain (scientific or moral), nature of the topic (controversial or noncontroversial), and teaching method (direct instruction by…

On May 31st 2012 the ACTive ALIA Group and Australian Government Libraries Information network (AGLIN) ran a national symposium on the topic of "Value of Libraries". Approximately 80 attended this event which was designed to challenge librarians with conversations that focused on economic and other means of demonstrating our value--value…

For skills that involve hitting a target, subsequent judgments of target size correlate with prior success in hitting that target. We used an archery context to examine the judgment-success relationship with varied target sizes in the absence of explicit knowledge of results. Competitive archers shot at targets 50 m away that varied in size among…

Examiners' grading judgements are central to the maintenance of examination standards. This research investigated the judgement processes underpinning examination grading. Operating under a think aloud protocol, six examiners conducted a grading exercise for each of two geography A level examinations. They also "thought aloud" whilst…

Tutors often have difficulty with accurately assessing a tutee's understanding. However, little is known about whether the professional expertise of tutors influences their assessment accuracy. In this study, the authors examined the accuracy with which 21 teacher tutors and 25 student tutors assessed a tutee's understanding of the human…

Justification is a core mathematics practice. Although the purposes of justification in the mathematician community have been studied extensively, we know relatively little about its role in K-12 classrooms. This paper documents the range of purposes identified by 12 middle grades teachers who were working actively to incorporate justification…

Research has shown that automatic evaluations can be highly robust and difficult to change, highly malleable and easy to change, and highly context dependent. We tested a representational account of these disparate findings, which specifies the conditions under which automatic evaluations reflect (a) initially acquired information, (b)…