During the late 1970s and 1980s, as interest in Lev Vygotsky's work was growing rapidly, most of his writings were unavailable in English. Translations of Vygotsky's work that reflect the breadth and depth of his thinking became available in the mid-to late 1990s. However, this work has yet to become an integral part of educational psychology.…

The three commentaries on the resubsumption theory highlight three key ideas: that the term "conceptual change", as commonly used, is ambiguous between "change in the meaning of a concept" and "change in what someone believes"; that there are multiple routes to successful learning of conceptual subject matters; and that the noticing of a…

Successful learning sometimes requires that the learner abandons or rejects one or more prior concepts, beliefs, or intuitive theories. Such "nonmonotonic changes" are widely believed to have a low probability of occurring spontaneously and to be difficult to promote with instruction. A theory of nonmonotonic cognitive change should explain both…

Why is conceptual change difficult yet possible? Ohlsson (2009/this issue) proposes that the answer can be found in the dynamics of resubsumption, or the process by which a domain of experience is resubsumed under an intuitive theory originally constructed to explain some other domain of experience. Here, it is argued that conceptual change is…

Alexander, Schallert, and Reynolds (2009/this issue) proposed a definition and landscape of learning that included 9 principles and 4 dimensions ("what," "who," "where," "when"). This commentary reflects on the utility of this definition and 4-dimensional landscape from the standpoint of educational psychologists who have a cognitive science…

This article revisits Paas and Van Merrienboer's (1993) measure of instructional efficiency, which can be applied by educational researchers to compare the effects of different instructional conditions on learning. This measure relied on performance and mental effort on the test, and as such gave an indication of the quality of learning outcomes.…

Although explanations are a common means of instruction, research shows that they often do not contribute to learning. To unravel the factors giving rise to the ineffectiveness of instructional explanations, we propose a framework that brings together empirical work on instructional explanations from a variety of research fields, including…

We propose a two-component theory of text signaling devices. The first component is a text-based analysis that characterizes any signaling device along four dimensions: (a) the type of information it makes available, (b) its scope, (c) how it is realized in the text, and (d) its location with respect to the content it cues. The second component is…

When harassed by peers, elementary school students often face a dilemma of whether to ask their teacher for help. Assistance may be useful, and perhaps necessary. However, there can be social costs; children generally are expected to resolve interpersonal conflicts on their own. Two theoretical perspectives (i.e., coping and self-regulation)…

Evolutionary psychology raises questions about how cognitive adaptations might be related to the emergence of formal schooling. Is there a special role for natural domains of cognition such as folk physics, folk psychology and folk biology? These domains may vary from small fragments of reasoning to large integrated systems. This heterogeneity…

Schools are a central interface between evolution and culture. They are the contexts in which children learn the evolutionarily novel abilities and knowledge needed to function as adults in modern societies. Evolutionary educational psychology is the study of how an evolved bias in children's learning and motivational systems influences their…

Dr. David C. Geary's article centers on the concept of inherited folk psychology modules, together with the idea of a transition from primary to secondary learning. This article suggests that there exist only effective folk psychology modules, which are the result of interaction of inherited primary emotional systems with the physical, biological,…

In response to a stimulating article by David C. Geary on the value of understanding the evolutionary basis of learning as a guide to instruction, I raise several objections. When evolutionary theory is used to explain everything from sex differences in math and reading to why children are bored in school, it loses its explanatory power. There is…

David C. Geary's thesis has the potential to alter our understanding of those aspects of human cognition relevant to instruction. His distinction between biologically primary knowledge that we have evolved to acquire and biologically secondary knowledge that is culturally important, taught in educational institutions and which we have not evolved…

Commentators' questions about the utility of an evolutionarily informed approach to children's schooling are addressed. I begin with discussion of our knowledge of the organization of evolved folk domains and clarify my proposals as to how evolved learning and motivational biases might influence the acquisition of nonevolved academic competencies.…