A total of 96 children ages five, six, and seven were asked to judge the acceptability of eight three-sentence "stories" told by a puppet and to justify their responses. Stories differed in whether they were consistent or inconsistent and in whether the principle upon which the story's consistency depended was implicitly or explicitly…

Two experiments were conducted to explore infant responsiveness to color and temperature novelty under bimodal conditions. In experiment 1, a total of 48 infants of 26-31 weeks were familiarized with a warm-red, warm-blue, cool-red, or cool-blue object, and assigned to one of three experimental groups. Each group was stimulated by a novel test…

This study used adult recall of childhood dreams to test Cann and Donderi's (1986) findings that Jungian intuitives recall more archetypal dreams than do sensate subjects, and that introverts recall more everyday dreams than extraverts. It was hypothesized that since dreams recalled from childhood are relatively high in archetypal content, there…

Learning and understanding of science instructional material was examined from a cognitive load perspective. Diagrams were expected to reduce cognitive load by allowing students to process information using fewer elements in working memory than an equivalent text-based format. Two experiments using different chemistry instructions confirmed these…

Aligned with recent changes to syllabuses in Australia is an assessment regime requiring teachers to identify what their students "know" and "can do" in terms of the quality of understanding demonstrated. This paper describes the experiences of 25 secondary science and mathematics teachers in rural schools in New South Wales as…

The name of Zoltan P. Dienes (1916- ) stands with those of Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, Edward Begle, and Robert Davis as a legendary figure whose work left a lasting impression on the field of mathematics education. Dienes' name is synonymous with the multibase blocks that he invented for the teaching of place value. Among numerous other things,…

Twenty-four children with dyslexia (aged 7;7 to 12;1) and twenty-four age-matched controls named pictures aloud while hearing nonsense syllables either phonologically related (i.e., part of) or unrelated to the target picture name. Compared with controls, dyslexics had slower reaction times overall and, for low frequency items, the degree of…

The lack of a conceptually and psychometrically strong measure of human mental workload has undermined interpretations of research based on cognitive load theory. Applying a confirmatory factor analysis approach to construct validation, a Subjective Mental Workload Survey was developed with four distinct subscales: Difficulty, Incompetence,…

The current study investigated the nature of subjective cognitive complaints of older adults in relation to a broad array of individual cognitive functions known to decline with age. A 60-item questionnaire was developed to examine: (1) whether older adults experience problems with these cognitive functions (problems with cognition); (2) the…

This study examined whether adult attachment and cognitive distortion mediate the relationship between childhood trauma and psychological adjustment. The participants were 219 students (40 men and 117 women) enrolled in a university degree. Participants completed the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, which assessed retrospective accounts of…

Purpose: To provide an understanding of the ways in which Confucian Heritage students use reflection as a means of learning at university. Design/methodology/approach: The approach is an exploratory qualitative study into the ways in which Confucian Heritage students learn while studying at university. Data are collected by means of…

Concludes that strategies are not responsible for memory span development in children 7 through 13 years old. Running and fixed memory span tasks and a running probe task were administered to 38 children. The probe task showed age differences as great as with the fixed span task. Span was reduced by approximately half an item over all ages.…

The psychodynamics of learning and teaching at a time of changing funding arrangements and priorities are explored and discussed through students' accounts of their experience of university. The contextual, organizational and socio-political characteristics implicated in these psychodynamic processes are considered. Among the psychodynamic issues…

The author describes a pilot study to investigate the extent to which learners use imagery in a variety of spatial problems. In order to discover how to encourage pupils to use imagery and thus to become better problem solvers, this study set out firstly to explore how pupils are able to use imagery in a variety of tasks. The tasks involved mental…

Mathematics games are often used in the classroom as a reward or warm-up activity before the "real" learning takes place. Many teachers have witnessed how useful games are for tuning-in students to the impending mathematics lesson. However, have teachers considered playing games as the central part of the lesson? This article explores…