The authors investigated the impact of explicit instruction and peer-assisted writing on students' writing motivation and self-efficacy for writing. Eleven teachers and their 206 fifth- and sixth-grade students participated in a 2 (explicit instruction vs. writing opportunities without explicit instruction) × 2 (peer-assisted writing vs. writing…

Recent empirical and theoretical work has depicted a close relationship between visual attention and visual working memory. For example, rehearsal in spatial working memory depends on spatial attention, whereas adding a secondary spatial working memory task impairs attentional deployment in visual search. These findings have led to the proposal…

Achievement goal theory is one of the most popular theories of achievement motivation. Techniques researchers have used to assess goals include standardized questionnaires and interviews. One curious finding is that participants whose self-report questionnaire responses strongly indicate they operate with a performance goal do not make performance…

The aim of this study is to analyse the effect of tasks on the detection of explanation obstacles when secondary school students read scientific texts. Students were instructed to read short passages under different task conditions, and to ask questions if necessary. Obstacle detection was operationalised in terms of the type of questions asked by…

Few studies have investigated the effects of the instructions provided in educational computer games on cognitive processing and learning outcomes. In our experiment, we sought to compare the effects on learning outcomes of two different types of goal-oriented instructions: "mastery-goal" instructions, which prompt learners to develop…

In this study, we addressed the question of the nature of the information needed by 13-month-old infants to understand another agent's intentions. In two experiments, an experimenter was either unable or unwilling to give a toy to an infant. Importantly, an implement (a gutter in which the toy could roll down toward the infant) was used to make…

Recent research has reported successful training interventions that improve insight problem solving. In some ways this is surprising, because the processes involved in insight solutions are often assumed to be unconscious, whereas the training interventions focus on conscious cognitive strategies. We propose one mechanism that may help to explain…

In Ireland, new science curricula were introduced at primary and early post-primary levels in 2003, in an effort to reverse declining interest and enrolment in science. This paper reports on a national study that explored first year post-primary students' experiences of and attitudes towards school science under these new curricula. Data were…

This article is about experimentation in both practical and mental activity and uses data from a series of studies with preschool children. The article focuses on personal experimentation, which is aimed at discovering relations, rather than the more utilitarian experimentation that is aimed at solving practical tasks. Personal experimentation…

Background: Coaches developing young talent in team sports must maximise practice and learning of essential game skills and accurately and continuously assess the performance and potential of each player. Relative age effects highlight an erroneous process of initial and on-going player assessment, based largely on subjective opinions of game…

As a medium for learning, digital games provide promising possibilities to motivate and engage students in subject learning. In this study, a game-based learning system, My-Pet-My-Quest, is developed to support pupils' math learning. This is due to the fact that most students in Taiwan have relatively lower positive attitude towards math learning,…

Three experiments examined the difficulty of translating cues into verbal representations of task goals by varying the degree of cue transparency (auditory transparent cues, visual transparent cues, visual arbitrary cues) in the Advanced Dimensional Change Card Sort, which requires switching between color- and shape-sorting rules on the basis of…

We tested 7-month-old infants' sensitivity to others' goals in an imitation task, and assessed whether infants are as likely to imitate the goals of nonhuman agents as they are to imitate human goals. In the current studies, we used the paradigm developed by Hamlin et. al (in press) to test infants' responses to human actions versus closely…

Reports a retraction of "Hierarchical encoding of behavior: Translating perception into action" by Bridgette Martin Hard, Sandra C. Lozano and Barbara Tversky (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2006[Nov], Vol 135[4], 588-608). All authors retract this article. Co-author Tversky and co-author Hard believe that the research results cannot…

In self-paced learning, when the regulation of effort is goal driven (e.g., allocated to different items according to their relative importance), judgments of learning (JOLs) increase with study time. When it is data driven (i.e., determined by the ease of committing the item to memory), JOLs decrease with study time (Koriat, Ma'ayan, &…