The present article investigates the effects of epistemic beliefs (i.e. beliefs about the nature of knowledge and knowing) on the effectiveness of information literacy instruction (i.e. instruction on how to search for scholarly information in academic settings). We expected psychology students with less sophisticated beliefs (especially…

In this paper, we describe the advantages of an experiential training group, specifically conceived for psychology students, in which the goal was to activate reflection on the internalized social representations of professional identity. Our study showed the results of a pre-post comparison of a one-group intervention. It was aimed to demonstrate…

Social work practitioners increasingly use mindfulness techniques, and research into the impact of this practice is being explored by multiple related disciplines, such as psychology and education. Cultivating the potential benefits of mindfulness at multiple practice levels necessitates curricular integration of mindfulness training. This article…

In this paper, we explore the results of a short-term concept-based pedagogical intervention on the learning of declension as a meaning-making resource among US university learners of German. The pedagogical approached derived its principles from Vygotskian sociocultural psychology, namely the role of explicit, scientific (i.e., abstract and…

Ethics blind spots, which have become a keystone of the emerging behavioral ethics literature, are essentially biases, heuristics, and psychological traps. Though students typically recognize that ethical challenges exist in the world at large, they often fail to see when they are personally prone to ethics blind spots. This creates an obstacle…

Experts are more proficient in manipulating and translating between multiple representations (MRs) of a given concept than novices. Studies have shown that instruction using MR can increase student understanding of MR, and one model for MR instruction in chemistry is the chemistry triplet proposed by Johnstone. Concreteness fading theory suggests…

Formative assessments and feedback are vital to enhancing learning outcomes but require that learners feel at ease identifying their errors, and receiving feedback from a trusted source--teachers. An experimental test of a new theoretical framework was conducted to cultivate a pedagogical alliance to enhance students' (a) trust in the teacher, (b)…

Administrators often struggle in getting teachers to trust their school's evaluation practices--a necessity if teachers are to learn from the feedback they receive. We attempted to bolster teachers' support for receiving evaluative feedback from a particularly controversial source: student-perception surveys. For our intervention, we took one of…

A majority of the challenging words that adolescent readers encounter in school texts are morphologically complex and from the Latinate layer of English. For these words, bound roots carry important meaning, such as the relation between innovative and its bound root, nov, meaning "new." This study investigated the effects of instruction…

This paper reports a study using a quasi-experimental design to examine whether an academic writing course in English can improve graduate students' academic and popular science writing skills. To address this issue, we designed pre- and post-assessment tasks, an intervention assessment task and a scoring rubric. The pre- and post-assessment tasks…

The ability to interpret graphs is highly important in modern society, but has proven to be a challenge for many people. In this paper, two teaching methods were used to remediate one specific misinterpretation: the area misinterpretation of box plots. First, we used refutational text to explicitly state and invalidate the area misinterpretation…

This study examined the impact of incorporating group design projects into a second-year engineering class on achievement goal orientations and two academic outcomes: concept inventory and final exam scores. In this study, two sections were taught using lecture format, but one section also completed three group design projects as part of their…

The Teaching for Transformative Experience in Science (TTES) model has shown to be a useful tool to generate learning and engagement in science. We investigated the effectiveness of TTES for facilitating transformative experience (TE), learning, the development of topic interest and transfer of course concepts to other courses employing a…

An exploratory study of the efficacy of "The Word Within the Word" tested students' abilities to recognize, use, and recall vocabulary. Ten middle school teachers and their 493 students participated. Five teachers used "The Word Within the Word", and five used traditional vocabulary materials. Students completed an out-of-level…

In this study, the authors tested the effects of Tekster [Texter], a comprehensive strategy-focused writing instruction program, using a switching replication design with three measurement occassions. The program was implemented by fourth, fifth, and sixth grade teachers (N = 76) in 60 general education classrooms in the Netherlands. Students (n =…