Mike accidentally knocked against a bottle. Seeing that the bottle was about to fall, Jack was just about to catch it when Peter accidentally knocked against him, making Jack unable to catch it. Jack did not grab the bottle, and it fell to the ground and spilled. In double-prevention cases like these, philosophers and nonphilosophers alike tend to…

How do people come to opposite causal judgments about societal problems, such as whether a public health policy reduced COVID-19 cases? The current research tests an understudied cognitive mechanism in which people may agree about what "actually" happened (e.g., that a public health policy was implemented and COVID-19 cases declined),…

Pseudo-profound bullshit pertains to grammatically and syntactically correct but meaningless sentences, that, due to syntactical correctness appear as made to communicate something and research shows that people deem them profound. However, the effect of differing source credibility on bullshit profoundness evaluations has, to our knowledge, not…

The world can be a confusing place, which leads to a significant challenge: how do we figure out what is true? To accomplish this, children possess two relevant skills: reasoning about the likelihood of their own accuracy (metacognitive confidence) and reasoning about the likelihood of others' accuracy (mindreading). Guided by Signal Detection…

Often, the evidence we observe is consistent with more than one explanation. How do learners discriminate among candidate causes? The current studies examine whether counterfactuals help 5-year olds (N = 120) select between competing hypotheses and compares the effectiveness of these prompts to a related scaffold. In Experiment 1, counterfactuals…

The purpose of this dissertation is to describe a doctoral research study that comprehensively investigated school psychologists' record review practices. Record reviews are part of the psychoeducational evaluation process, and there is relatively little previous research literature on this topic. The current study aimed to investigate the…

When physicians are asked to determine the positive predictive value from the a priori probability of a disease and the sensitivity and false positive rate of a medical test (Bayesian reasoning), it often comes to misjudgments with serious consequences. In daily clinical practice, however, it is not only important that doctors receive a tool with…

Collaborative argumentation in education, where students work together to construct and critique arguments, is an important social practice in many disciplines and can also develop conceptual understanding. This article addresses the evolution of my research agenda on collaborative argumentation from just scaffolding the generation of…

In a sample of 455 Taiwanese upper-secondary school students, latent variable structural equation modeling was used to test hypothesized relationships between beliefs about knowledge in science, beliefs about justification for knowing in science, and justification of knowledge claims concerning science encountered on the Internet. Results…

This study investigated eight experienced science teachers' and eight senior high school students' metavisualization when they drew models to represent their concepts of carbon cycling. Qualitative data collection techniques including think-aloud tasks and follow-up retrospective interviews were employed. The purposes of the study included: (1) to…