Mechanical reasoning is crucial for many engineering fields, yet undergraduate engineering students struggle to understand discipline-specific formalisms from their courses that model mechanical concepts. The current investigation observed undergraduate engineering students' speech during mechanical reasoning and the benefits of attending to…

This full paper considers how collaborative discourse can reveal ways upper-class engineering students mechanically reason about engineering concepts. Argumentation and negotiation during collaborative, multimodal discourse using speech and gestures helps establish common ground between learners and fosters reflection on their conceptual…

Understanding fraction magnitudes is especially important in daily life, but fraction reasoning is quite difficult. To accurately reason about fraction magnitudes, adults need to monitor what they know and what they do not know. However, little is known about which cues adults use to monitor fraction performance. Across two studies, we examined…

Despite the critical role of teachers in the educational process, few advanced learning technologies have been developed to support teacher-instruction or professional development. This lack of support is particularly acute for middle school math teachers, where only 37% felt well prepared to scaffold instruction to address the needs of diverse…

Learning from expository science texts is challenging. These studies explore whether difficulties can be attributed to poor memory or poor reasoning. To eliminate the need for memory during testing, some students took the tests with the texts available. To test for the effects of reasoning on performance, some students were prompted to engage in…

Diagrams are powerful opportunities for grappling with and learning abstract relationships, for example learning the relations between elements in an ecosystem rather than simply memorizing the objects within the system. Further, what is crucial from any diagrammatic learning opportunity is the ability to use this relational knowledge in a new…

At the onset of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) global pandemic, our interdisciplinary team hypothesized that a mathematical misconception--whole number bias (WNB)--contributed to beliefs that COVID-19 was less fatal than the flu. We created a brief online educational intervention for adults, leveraging evidence-based cognitive science…

Abstraction is a core principle of Distributional Semantic Models (DSMs) that learn semantic representations for words by applying dimensional reduction to statistical redundancies in language. Although the posited learning mechanisms vary widely, virtually all DSMs are prototype models in that they create a single abstract representation of a…

Reasoning about numerical magnitudes is a key aspect of mathematics learning. Most research examining the relation of magnitude understanding to general mathematics achievement has focused on whole number and fraction magnitudes. The present longitudinal study (N=435) used a 3-step latent class analysis to examine reasoning about magnitudes on a…

This research tests whether analogical learning is present before language comprehension. Three-month-old infants were habituated to a series of analogous pairs, instantiating either the "same" relation (e.g., AA, BB, etc.) or the "different" relation (e.g., AB, CD, etc.), and then tested with further exemplars of the…

Detecting a pattern within a sequence of ordered units, defined as patterning, is a cognitive ability that is important in learning mathematics and influential in learning to read. The present study was designed to examine relations between first-grade children's executive functions, patterning, and reading abilities, and to examine whether these…

This study examines differences in English language comprehension, reading fluency, and executive functions among Spanish-English bilinguals with reading difficulties. Reading difficulties examined included general reading difficulties, defined by low word reading and reading comprehension, and specific-reading comprehension difficulties, defined…

Young children have been taught simple sequences of alternating shapes and colors, referred to as "patterning", for the past half century in the hope that their understanding of pre-algebra and their mathematics achievement would be improved. The evidence that such patterning instruction actually improves children's academic achievement…

Student explanations of their mathematical thinking and conclusions have become a greater part of the assessment landscape in recent years. With a sample of 71 4th-grade students at-risk for mathematics learning disabilities, we investigated the relation between student accuracy in comparing the magnitude of fractions and the quality of students'…

The purpose of the study was to determine whether individual differences in at-risk 4th graders' language comprehension, nonverbal reasoning, concept formation, working memory, and use of decimal labels (i.e., place value, point, incorrect place value, incorrect fraction, or whole number) are related to their decimal magnitude understanding.…