Traditional, template physics labs are often associated with student dissatisfaction and superficial applications, and are known to leave students with fragmented knowledge. An alternative known as labatorials, a conceptually driven approach to labs, has been proposed. In a number of studies, labatorials have been shown to work well. However, what…

The word length effect, better recall of lists of short (fewer syllables) than long (more syllables) words has been termed a benchmark effect of working memory. Despite this, experiments on the word length effect can yield quite different results depending on set size and stimulus properties. Seven experiments are reported that address these 2…

When readers search for misspellings in a proofreading task or for a letter in a letter detection task, they are more likely to omit function words than content words. However, with misspelled words, previous findings for the letter detection task were mixed. In two experiments, the authors tested the functional equivalence of both tasks. Results…

The Canadian Remote Sciences Laboratories (CRSL) website (www.remotelab.ca) was successfully employed in a study of the differences in the performance and perceptions of students' about their learning in the laboratory (in-person) versus learning at a remote location (remote access). The experiment was completed both in-person and via remote…

The sequence in which problems of different concepts are studied during instruction impacts concept learning. For example, several problems of a given concept can be studied together (blocking) or several problems of different concepts can be studied together (interleaving). In the current study, we demonstrate that the 2 sequences impact concept…

Three experiments examined the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings in Grade 5 students. In Experiment 1, homophone and spelling control errors were embedded in a story context and participants performed a proofreading task as they read for meaning. For both good and poor readers, more homophone errors went undetected than spelling…

Developing critical thinking skills is a common goal of an undergraduate physics curriculum. How do students make sense of evidence and what do they do with it? In this study, we evaluated students' critical thinking behaviors through their written notebooks in an introductory physics laboratory course. We compared student behaviors in the…

Two experiments investigated response tendencies of preschoolers toward yes-no questions about actions. Two hundred 2- to 5-year-old children were asked questions concerning actions commonly associated with particular objects (e.g., drinking from a cup) and actions not commonly associated with particular objects (e.g., kicking a toothbrush). The…

According to the hypothesis of a scalar property for time, the variability to time ratio should be constant. Three experiments tested the validity of this hypothesis in a restricted range of durations (standard values = 1, 1.3, 1.6, and 1.9 s). In each experiment, time intervals to be discriminated, reproduced, or categorized were presented with…

We surveyed researchers in the health and exercise sciences to explore different areas and magnitudes of bias in researchers' decision making. Participants were presented with scenarios (testing a central hypothesis with p = 0.06 or p = 0.04) in a random order and surveyed about what they would do in each scenario. Participants showed significant…

Pseudoscience is a ubiquitous aspect of popular culture which constitutes a direct challenge to science, and by association, to science education. With the exception of politically influential pseudosciences trying to impose themselves on official curricula such as creationism, science education authorities and professional organisations seem…

Children's ability to distinguish between enjoyment and non-enjoyment smiles was investigated by presenting participants with short video excerpts of smiles. Enjoyment smiles differed from non-enjoyment smiles by greater symmetry and by appearance changes produced in the eye region by the Cheek Raiser action. The results indicate that 6- and…

Two experiments were conducted to assess an online version of Keller's personalized system of instruction, called computer-aided personalized system of instruction (CAPSI), as part of a blended learning design with regard to course knowledge and critical thinking development. In Experiment 1, two lecture sections of an introduction to University…