Differences exist between engineering and liberal arts students because of their educational backgrounds. Therefore, they solve problems differently. This study examined the brain activation of these two groups of students when they responded to 12 questions of verbal, numerical, or spatial intelligence. A total of 25 engineering and 25 liberal…

This study investigated a highly accomplished third-grade teacher's noticing of students' mathematical thinking as she taught multiplication and division. Through an innovative method, which allowed for documenting in-the-moment teacher noticing, the author was able to explore teacher noticing and reflective practices in the context of classroom…

Researchers in the science education community make extensive use of cognitive clinical interviews as windows into student knowledge and thinking. Despite our familiarity with the interviews, there has been very limited research addressing the ways that students understand these interactions. In this work, we examine students' behaviors and speech…

This paper disentangles cognitive and communicative factors influencing planning strategies in the everyday task of choosing a route to a familiar location. Describing the way for a stranger in town calls for fundamentally different cognitive processes and strategies than actually walking to a destination. In a series of experiments, this paper…

Two-year-old children's reasoning about the relation between their own and others' preferences was investigated across two studies. In Experiment 1, children first observed 2 actors display their individual preferences for various toys. Children were then asked to make inferences about new, visually inaccessible toys and books that were described…

Work in category learning addresses how humans acquire knowledge and, thus, should inform classroom practices. In two experiments, we apply and evaluate intuitions garnered from laboratory-based research in category learning to learning tasks situated in an educational context. In Experiment 1, learning through predictive inference and…

The ability to use analogical reasoning traditionally has been considered a higher-level ability characteristic of thinking of older children and adults. Such reasoning has not been thought to be accessible to younger children. However, recently, it has been suggested that younger children's ability to understand and solve analogical problems…

The present research examined alternative accounts of prior violation-of-expectation (VOE) reports that young infants can represent and reason about hidden objects. According to these accounts, young infants' apparent success in these VOE tasks reflects only novelty and familiarity preferences induced by the habituation or familiarization trials…

This study examined young children's cognitive engagement during classroom book reading with different types of books in Greek kindergarten schools. Twenty teachers read four books--two fiction (familiar/unfamiliar story format) and two information books (expository/narrative text). As expected, children's and teachers' cognitive engagement was…