Engagement is one of the hottest research topics in the field of educational psychology. Research shows that multifarious benefits occur when students are engaged in their own learning, including increased motivation and achievement. However, there is little agreement on a concrete definition and effective measurement of engagement. This special…

Science is of critical importance to daily life in a knowledge society and has a significant influence on many everyday decisions. As scientific problems increase in their number and complexity, so do the challenges facing the public in understanding these issues. Our objective is to focus on 3 of those challenges: the challenge of reasoning about…

The received view of mathematical practice is that mathematicians gain certainty in mathematical assertions by deductive evidence rather than empirical or authoritarian evidence. This assumption has influenced mathematics instruction where students are expected to justify assertions with deductive arguments rather than by checking the assertion…

One of the central unresolved conceptual issues that concerns researchers of personal epistemology is the characterization of the intersection between personal epistemology and cognitional. The contested and diverse nature of both constructs makes untangling their connections a complex yet vital task. The purpose of this article is to advance the…

Over the past 20 years, there has been much research on how people learn from case comparisons. This work has implemented comparison activities in a variety of different ways across a wide range of laboratory and classroom contexts. In an effort to assess the overall effectiveness of case comparisons across this diversity of implementation and…

Dialogue, as a communication form characterized by its commitment to inclusiveness and rationality, has long been advocated by educators as a mechanism for helping students become better thinkers. Unfortunately, numerous claims about the educational potential of participating in dialogue have not resulted in substantial changes in classroom…

We synthesize ideas from the foregoing articles in this special issue and from the broader literature on transfer to explore several themes. In many ordinary life circumstances, transfer proceeds easily, but formal learning often shows much less transfer than educators would like, making failure to transfer a focus of investigation. Transfer, like…

In this theoretical contribution, our purpose is to examine the nature of reading competence as it unfolds at the present and to project that nature into the future. More specifically, we ask what it will mean to be a competent reader for the 21st century and what combination of knowledge, beliefs, abilities, and processes that competence will…

Psychological and educational researchers have developed a flourishing research program on epistemological dimensions of cognition (epistemic cognition). Contemporary philosophers investigate many epistemological topics that are highly relevant to this program but that have not featured in research on epistemic cognition. We argue that integrating…

In present-day knowledge societies, competent reading involves the integration of information from multiple sources into a coherent, meaningful representation of a topic, issue, or situation. This article reviews research and theory concerning the comprehension of multiple textual resources, focusing especially on linkages recently established…

Users benefit most from computer-based learning environments (CBLEs) when they are adept at self-regulated learning (SRL). Learner characteristics, such as epistemic beliefs, influence SRL processing. Therefore, research into learning with CBLEs must account for interactions between epistemic beliefs and SRL. In this article we integrate epistemic…

In this article we propose that in order to advance our understanding of motivation in collaborative learning we should move beyond the cognitive-situative epistemological divide and combine individual and social processes. Our claim is that although recent research has recognized the importance of social aspects in emerging and sustained…

Among his many accomplishments in educational psychology, Merlin C. Wittrock is perhaps best remembered for his enduring contributions to the science of learning. His vision of how learning works is best explicated in articles published in "Educational Psychologist" (Wittrock, 1974, 1978, 1989, 1991, 1992), beginning with his classic 1974 article,…

In this article, I examine developments in research on achievement motivation and comment on how those developments are reflected in Wittrock's generative model of learning. Specifically, I focus on the roles of prior knowledge, the generation of knowledge, and beliefs about ability. Examples from Wittrock's theory and from current motivational…

Over the past decades research on learning has become more diverse and complex. The concern expressed by Alexander, Schallert, and Reynolds (2009/this issue) is that this diversity of theoretical perspectives has resulted in a fragmentation that is destructive to the field. Although it is important to engage in explicit discussions of how learning…