Young children engage in pre-engineering thinking and play in their day-to-day activities. However, early childhood teachers often miss opportunities to facilitate and extend this type of play. In order to support teachers in this undertaking, the current study aimed to answer the question: What does pre-engineering thinking look like in…

The instructional innovation incubator (i3) model is a fully immersive, multi-campus, residential experience designed to address the wicked problem of online teaching and learning. This paper details how we used design thinking to hatch, design, prototype and implement the i3 model, a radical departure from conventional practice in educational…

Previous research is mixed regarding whether laypeople are sensitive to sample size. Here the author argues that this is in part because sample size sensitivity follows a curvilinear function with decreasing sensitivity as sample size become larger. This functional form reconciles apparent discrepancies in the literature, accounting for results…

Among a sample of counseling students, results from hierarchical regression and mediation analyses indicated that attachment anxiety led to an increase in use of cognitive distortions, contributing to increased difficulty with corrective feedback during clinical supervision. Findings implicate a need for awareness of attachment patterns among…

Creative thinking shares many characteristics with traditional complex tasks. We investigated whether implicit theories of creativity would affect creative thinking in a way similar to the impact of implicit theories of intelligence on academic tasks. We altered participants' theories of creativity to be either more incremental or more…

Psychology has made, and continues to make, a significant contribution to the discipline area of education. Since one of the main aims of education concerns student learning -- which is an indisputably psychological phenomenon -- we argue that the emerging research agenda of embodied cognition has much to offer educational practitioners,…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the verbal short-term memory skills of children who stutter (CWS) and children who do not stutter (CWNS) in 2 experiments, focusing on the influence of phonological and semantic similarity. Method: Participants were 42 CWS and 42 CWNS between the ages of 3;0 and 5;11 (years;months). In Experiment…

Purpose: The study aims to test whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) show weaknesses in word retrieval and cognitive control and to find out whether impairments in the 2 domains are associated. Method: Thirty-one children with SLI (age: M = 8;11 years;months, SD = 1;1) and 31 age- and IQ-matched typically developing children…

Previous studies have revealed that "neuromyths," which are misconceptions about the brain, show a high prevalence among teachers in different countries. However, little is known about the origin of these ideas; that is to say, the sources that may influence their presence among teachers. This research aims to identify the prevalence of…

Background: A key question in K-12 STEM education is how best to guide students as they engage in exploratory learning activities so that students develop transferable knowledge. We investigated this question in a study of teacher talk guidance of an exploratory activity called Invention. In this study, teachers worked one-on-one with students,…

Cognitive load theory is one of the most influential theoretical explanations of cognitive processing during learning. Despite its success, attempts to assess cognitive load during learning have proven difficult. Therefore, in the current study, students' self-reported cognitive load after the problem- solving process has been combined with…

Self-rated mental effort has been and continues to be the most widely used measure of cognitive load. This single-item measure is often used as a predictor variable in linear models for predicting performance or some other response variable. While an advantage of linear models is that they are fairly easy to understand, they fall short when the…

A striking characteristic of human thought is that we form representations about abstract kinds (Giraffes have purple tongues), despite experiencing only particular individuals (This giraffe has a purple tongue). These generic generalizations have been hypothesized to be a cognitive default, that is, more basic and automatic than other forms of…

Previous studies indicate that autobiographical memory is impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Successful recollection of information referring to one's own person requires the intact ability to re-activate representation of the past self. In the current fMRI study we investigated process of conscious reflection on the…

Students with poor spatial abilities experience a barrier to academic success early in the STEM curriculum. However, Sorby et al. report that even brief training can improve spatial reasoning in students who lack them. Further, the National Research Council recommends that spatial thinking skills be taught at all educational levels. Halpern…