This article considers the practice of learning poems and the value of poetry in the memory, and emerges from the Cambridge Poetry Teaching Project, a small-scale research study co-ordinated through the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. Drawing on the subset of findings in relation to learning and memory, the essay locates the…

Studies examined the potential use of VEs in teaching historical chronology to 127 children of primary school age (8-9 years). The use of passive fly-through VEs had been found, in an earlier study, to be disadvantageous with this age group when tested for their subsequent ability to place displayed sequential events in correct chronological…

This paper examines professional development workshops focused on Connected Math, a particular curriculum utilized or being considered by the middle-school mathematics teachers involved in the study. The hope was that as teachers better understood the curriculum used in their classrooms, i.e., Connected Math, they would simultaneously deepen their…

Three kinds of knowledge usually recognised by epistemologists are identified and their relevance for curriculum design is discussed. These are: propositional knowledge, know-how and knowledge by acquaintance. The inferential nature of propositional knowledge is argued for and it is suggested that propositional knowledge in fact presupposes the…

The authors examined the difference in standardized test performance when familiar versus unfamiliar examiners tested 26 preschool and elementary-aged children with autism. The children were matched by age, severity, and developmental level and then randomly placed into familiar and unfamiliar examiner groups. Familiarity with the examiner was…

Effects of culture-specific experience on musical rhythm perception are evident by 12 months of age, but the role of culture-general rhythm processing constraints during early infancy has not been explored. Using a habituation procedure with 5- and 7-month-old infants, we investigated effects of temporal interval ratio complexity on discrimination…

Determining the referent of a novel name is a critical task for young language learners. The majority of studies on children's referent selection focus on manipulating the sources of information (linguistic, contextual and pragmatic) that children can use to solve the referent mapping problem. Here, we take a step back and explore how children's…

A current controversy in memory research concerns whether recognition is supported by distinct processes of familiarity and recollection, or instead by a single process wherein familiarity and recollection reflect weak and strong memories, respectively. Recent studies using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses in an animal model have…

Student interest in artificial sweeteners can enhance the biochemistry classroom learning experience. This in class, guided-inquiry activity focuses on sucralose and fits into a 50-min biochemistry class for undergraduate science majors. Background knowledge of carbohydrate structure, function, and metabolism as well as familiarity with…

We used a novel automatic camera, SenseCam, to create a recognition memory test for real-life events. Adapting a "Remember/Know" paradigm, we asked healthy undergraduates, who wore SenseCam for 2 days, in their everyday environments, to classify images as strongly or weakly remembered, strongly or weakly familiar or novel, while brain activation…

When participants must classify their recognition experiences as remembering or knowing, variables often have dissociative effects on the two judgments. In contrast, when participants independently rate recollection "and" familiarity only parallel effects have been reported. To investigate this discrepancy we compared the effects of masked priming…

Examining the intersection of civic engagement and environmental literacy is particularly timely because 2012 marked a critical juncture in history: the United Nations Literacy Decade ended, and a 20-year appraisal of the United Nation's Earth Summit commenced. The Literacy Decade, launched in 2003 under the slogan "Literacy as Freedom," situated…

Rules, and exceptions to such rules, are ubiquitous in many domains, including language. Here we used simple artificial grammars to investigate the influence of 2 factors on the acquisition of rules and their exceptions, namely type frequency (the relative numbers of different exceptions to different regular items) and token frequency (the number…

Thirty- and 36-month-old English speakers' (N = 106) ability to produce jokes, distinguish between humorous and sincere intentions, and distinguish between English- and foreign-language speakers, was examined in two tasks. In the Giving task, an experimenter requested one of two familiar objects, and a confederate always gave her the wrong object.…

Objectives: This study evaluates the utility of a new measure--the h-index--that may provide a more valid approach to evaluating journal quality in the social work profession. Method: H-index values are compared with Thomson ISI 5-year impact factors and expert opinion. Results: As hypothesized, the h-index correlates highly with ISI 5-year impact…