Background: In the 1970s and 1980s, there was considerable discussion about the potential of student-designed games to help students develop a more refined and deeper understanding of games. Unfortunately, despite these sophisticated conversations, there has been limited empirical research on the effectiveness of student-designed games,…

Questionnaire and interview findings from a survey of three Year 8 (ages 12-13 years) science practical lessons (n = 52) demonstrate how pupils' data collection and inference making were sometimes biased by desires to confirm a personal theory. A variety of behaviours are described where learners knowingly rejected anomalies, manipulated…

This article describes how a university and a museum have worked together to create a "How science works" workshop entitled "What's in our water?" The workshop teaches students about the continuing pollution from a disused coal mine, how the pollution is cleaned up using a state-of-the-art treatment works and how scientists…

"If I have seen further, it is because I have stood upon the shoulders of giants." Whenever the author hears this quote from Isaac Newton, she thinks about the work being done by the Royal Society in schools throughout the country, bringing science to life for their students. Much of it is also cutting edge, and represents the best of…

The effector dependence of automatic imitation was investigated using a stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) procedure during which participants were required to make an open or closed response with their hand or their mouth. The correct response for each trial was indicated by a pair of letters in Experiments 1 and 2 and by a colored square in…

Researchers from different disciplines have attempted to investigate the way in which people who are blind conceptualize and perceive elements of the spatial environment. Most of the studies that are reported in the literature use an experimental approach based on measurements of the performance in test situations of people who are blind or people…

In this paper, we will outline some results of an NCETM (National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics) funded project that aimed to establish a professional development network with an open-source mathematical software--GeoGebra--in England. During the past few years a large international user and developer community has formed…

In 1963, the University of Sussex inaugurated an innovative Early Leavers Scheme in response to two government reports which confirmed that it was still the norm for talented working-class children to leave school aged 15 or 16 and indicated that the hopes of the 1944 Education Act were as yet unfulfilled. This article explores what the scheme has…

Any individual's response intended to be random should be as probable as any other. However, 3 experiments show that many people's independent responses depart from the expected chance distribution. Participants responding to instructions of chance and related concepts favor the available options unequally in a similar way. Consequently, in…

Questionnaires were completed by 5044 12-year-old pupils in Oxfordshire state schools and initially used to identify classes where the pupils were more positive and enthusiastic about their science lessons than the majority. The teachers of these classes were identified and the views of their pupils as to what happens in their science lessons…

Previous studies on the impact of perceived threat on confirmatory information search (selective exposure) in the context of decision making have yielded mixed results. Some studies have suggested that confirmatory information search is reduced, yet others have found contradictory effects. The present series of 5 studies consistently found that…

The present study investigated the mechanisms underlying perceptual compensation for assimilation in novel words. During training, participants learned canonical versions of novel spoken words (e.g., "decibot") presented in isolation. Following exposure to a second set of novel words the next day, participants carried out a phoneme…

This paper contributes to the special issue by offering a new framework in time periods that demonstrates the changing nature of the intellectual transfer to and from colonial India and to posit the imperatives that drove these changes. It shows that the nature of educational exchange in India was transformed in elemental ways during the colonial…

According to Crain and Nakayama (1987), when forming complex yes/no questions, children do not make errors such as "Is the boy who smoking is crazy?" because they have innate knowledge of "structure dependence" and so will not move the auxiliary from the relative clause. However, simple recurrent networks are also able to avoid…

The laboratory component of undergraduate engineering education poses challenges in resource constrained engineering faculties. The cost, time, space and physical presence requirements of the traditional (real) laboratory approach are the contributory factors. These resource constraints may mitigate the acquisition of meaningful laboratory…