Education needs a psychological approach to its process and mechanism. Contemporary psychology is rooted in philosophical thought and physiological inquiry. Psychology cannot be separated from the influence of three schools in philosophy, i.e., materialism, empiricism, and positivism. One of the empiricist thinkers who gave nuances and color in…

Different "thought experiments" dominate teaching approaches to weightlessness, reducing students' opportunities for active physics learning, which should include observations, descriptions, explanations and predictions of real phenomena. Besides the controversy related to conceptual definitions of weight and weightlessness, we report…

Past studies of the treatment of Milgram's obedience experiments in social psychology textbooks from the 1960s to the 1990s discovered an evolving "Milgram-friendly" coverage style (dealing with criticisms of his experiments either summarily, in a pro-Milgram manner, or not at all). We examined 10 current social textbooks to determine…

The primary goal of this review is to highlight current research and theories describing the neurobiological basis of math (MD), reading (RD), and comorbid math and reading disability (MD+RD). We first describe the unique brain and cognitive processes involved in acquisition of math and reading skills, emphasizing similarities and differences in…

Numerous authors have suggested that religious belief has a positive association, possibly causal, with prosocial behavior. This article critiques evidence regarding this "religious prosociality" hypothesis from several areas of the literature. The extant literature on religious prosociality is reviewed including domains of charity,…

Over the course of a 5-year applied research project with more than 1,400 middle school students, evidence from a number of studies revealed that retrieval practice in authentic classroom settings improves long-term learning (Agarwal et al. 2009; McDaniel et al., "Journal of Educational Psychology" 103:399-414, 2011; McDaniel et al.…

Improvements in motor sequence performance have been observed after a delay involving sleep. This finding has been taken as evidence for an active sleep consolidation process that enhances subsequent performance. In a review of this literature, however, the authors observed 4 aspects of data analyses and experimental design that could lead to…

Generation is thought to enhance both item-specific and relational processing of generated targets as compared with read words (M. A. McDaniel & P. J. Waddill, 1990). Generation facilitates encoding of the cue-target relation and sometimes boosts encoding of relations across list items. Of interest is whether generation can also increase the…

Evaluated the first eleven years of experimental research (1973-1983) publications, with a focus on forensic psychology, that were cited in Psychological Abstracts. Results indicate: a paucity of experimental research; a significant difference between empirical and nonempirical publications; and a transition from descriptive to correlational and…

The many authors debating whether computers can understand often fail to clarify what understanding is, and no agreement exists on this important issue. In his Chinese room argument, Searle (1980) claims that computers running formal programs can never understand. I discuss Searle's claim based on a definition of understanding that is empirical,…

D. Algom, E. Chajut, and S. Lev presented a series of definitional, conceptual, and empirical arguments in support of their conclusion that the classic and emotional Stroop effects are, in their words, "unrelated phenomena" (p. 336), such that the term emotional Stroop effect is a misnomer in reference to the relatively greater interference in ink…

Recent experiments have shown that placing dissimilar items on lists of phonologically similar items enhances accuracy of ordered recall of the dissimilar items [Farrell, S., & Lewandowsky, S. (2003). Dissimilar items benefit from phonological similarity in serial recall. "Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition," 29,…

Reviewed is the work of W. H. Winch, a major pioneer of research in educational psychology in Britain in the early 1900s. He emphasized the need for research to be related to the teacher's classroom situation. (KC)

Recent studies of deductive reasoning are reviewed with respect to three questions: Do people reason logically? Is reasoning introspectible? Is reasoning sequential? It is argued that the evidence of reasoning experiments suggests a negative answer to all three questions, indicating that these experiments don't study "reasoning" in its everyday…

Discusses three sorts of psychological science: Science 1, a natural science with conditional (causal) laws; Science 2, with probabilistic laws; and Science 3, a "human science" trying to capture the complexity of human experience and behavior. Argues that Science 2 and Science 3 should be treated as belief systems which people may find useful for…