The abstract concept of time is conceptualized as moving linearly across space, known as the mental timeline (MTL). The direction of our MTL is consistent with reading direction. English speakers, who read left to right, think of past on the left and future on the right; the reverse is true of Hebrew speakers, who read right to left. However, it…

Proverbs are a part of cultural heritage of people. Proverbs about climate and weather influence human behaviours at such areas as agriculture and fishing. The pedagogical use of proverbs promotes to link everyday knowledge with scientific one. However, teachers should be familiar with the meanings of proverbs to integrate them into their classes.…

Research consistently shows that adults engaged in tutored acquisition benefit from explicit instruction in several linguistic domains. For preschool children, it is often assumed that such explicit instruction does not make a difference. In the present study, we investigated whether explicit instruction affected young learners in acquiring a…

Orchestration load is the effort a teacher spends in coordinating multiple activities and learning processes. It has been proposed as a construct to evaluate the usability of learning technologies at the classroom level, in the same way that cognitive load is used as a measure of usability at the individual level. However, so far this notion has…

Work in category learning addresses how humans acquire knowledge and, thus, should inform classroom practices. In two experiments, we apply and evaluate intuitions garnered from laboratory-based research in category learning to learning tasks situated in an educational context. In Experiment 1, learning through predictive inference and…

This paper reports a study on elementary students' ideas regarding changes in mass associated with melting. An open-ended probe was designed and distributed to fifth-grade students (n = 230). In addition, 50 students were asked their reasons behind predictions on mass change. The written responses indicate that, despite conventional teaching,…