System Dynamics is a required course offered to junior Mechanical Engineering students at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College. It addresses the intercoupling dynamics of a wide range of dynamic systems: including mechanical, electrical, fluid, hydraulic, electromechanical, and biomedical systems. This course is challenging for students due to the…

Experimentation is the foundation of science and an important process for students to understand and experience. However, it can be difficult to teach some aspects of experimentation within the time and resource constraints of an academic semester. Interactive models can be a useful tool in bridging this gap. This freely accessible simulation…

We examined, on a trial-by-trial basis, fraction magnitude comparison strategies of adults with more and less mathematical knowledge. College students with high mathematical proficiency used a large variety of strategies that were well tailored to the characteristics of the problems and that were guaranteed to yield correct performance if executed…

Understanding an arithmetic operation implies, at minimum, knowing the direction of effects that the operation produces. However, many children and adults, even those who execute arithmetic procedures correctly, may lack this knowledge on some operations and types of numbers. To test this hypothesis, we presented preservice teachers (Study 1),…

Research shows that multiple external representations can significantly enhance students' learning. Most of this research has focused on learning with text and 1 additional graphical representation. However, real instructional materials often employ multiple "graphical" representations (MGRs) in addition to text. An important open…

In 2 experiments the authors investigated whether assigning a perspective to middle school students prior to reading a long informational text would improve their reading comprehension. Pretest-posttest control group designs were employed in both experiments, in Experiment 1 (n = 146 fifth- and sixth-grade students) and in Experiment 2 (n = 83…

THIS STUDY WAS PHASE 1 OF A 2-PHASE PROJECT DESIGNED TO CHANGE TEACHER BEHAVIOR WITH THE OBJECTIVE OF IMPROVED CLASSROOM UTILIZATION OF NEW INSTRUCTIONAL MEDIA. PHASE 1 TRIED TO INCREASE TEACHER KNOWLEDGE OF MEDIA VIA A MONTHLY NEWSLETTER, "THE CIRCULATOR," DISTRIBUTED IN 5 DISSEMINATION PATTERNS TO 2,200 EDUCATORS IN PENNSYLVANIA. A…

Undergraduates studied nonword exemplars and then created their own novel nonwords. In Experiment 1, people studied legal or illegal nonwords. In Experiment 2, people studied illegal nonwords, but to increase awareness of the features, half of the participants assessed the features of the nonwords. Despite instructions to avoid copying any aspect…