Over the course of a 5-year applied research project with more than 1,400 middle school students, evidence from a number of studies revealed that retrieval practice in authentic classroom settings improves long-term learning (Agarwal et al. 2009; McDaniel et al., "Journal of Educational Psychology" 103:399-414, 2011; McDaniel et al. 2012; Roediger…

Every day, students and instructors are faced with the decision of when to study information. The timing of study, and how it affects memory retention, has been explored for many years in research on human learning. This research has shown that performance on final tests of learning is improved if multiple study sessions are separated--i.e.,…

When we rely upon gains on some measure to support statements of prescription, we have the obligation to ensure that those measures are valid. Nearly 10 years after an influential National Research Council ("2001") report on educational assessment identified an explicit model of cognition as one of three necessary components of a valid assessment…

Efforts to identify and support credible causal claims have received intense interest in the research community, particularly over the past few decades. In this paper, we focus on the use of statistical procedures designed to support causal claims for a treatment or intervention when the response variable of interest is dichotomous. We identify…

Longitudinal structural equation modeling (SEM) can be a basis for making prescriptive statements on educational practice and offers yields over "traditional" statistical techniques under the general linear model. The extent to which prescriptive statements can be made will rely on the appropriate accommodation of key elements of research design,…

From the perspectives of the philosophy of science and statistical inference, we discuss the challenges of making prescriptive statements in quantitative research articles. We first consider the prescriptive nature of educational research and argue that prescriptive statements are a necessity in educational research. The logic of deduction,…

The primary question regarding prescriptive appropriateness is a difficult one to answer for the qualitative researcher. While there are certainly qualitative researchers who have offered prescriptive protocols to better define and describe the terrain of qualitative research design and there are qualitative researchers who offer research…

A prescriptive statement is a recommendation that, if a course of action is taken, then a desirable outcome will likely occur. For example, in reading research recommending that teachers apply an intervention targeted at a specific reading skill to improve children's reading performance is a prescriptive statement. In our view, these statements…

The central role of the propensity score analysis (PSA) in observational studies is for causal inference; as such, PSA is often used for making causal claims in research articles. However, there are still some issues for researchers to consider when making claims of causality using PSA results. This summary first briefly reviews PSA, followed by…

The commentary considers when it is acceptable to make prescriptive statements in educational research articles. It begins with a consensus view, agreeing with the analysis offered by Marley and Levin (Educational Psychology Review, 2011), that experimental evidence is necessary. Other forms of evidence are considered (e.g., observational,…

Problem solving is an important skill in the knowledge economy. Research indicates that the development of problem solving skills works better in the context of instructional approaches centered on real-world problems. But students need scaffolding to be successful in such instruction. In this paper I present a conceptual framework for…

This meta-analysis integrates 296 effect sizes reported in eye-tracking research on expertise differences in the comprehension of visualizations. Three theories were evaluated: Ericsson and Kintsch's ("Psychol Rev" 102:211-245, 1995) theory of long-term working memory, Haider and Frensch's ("J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cognit" 25:172-190, 1999)…

This essay first summarizes an overarching theory of cognitive organization and development. This theory claims that the human mind involves (1) several specialized structural systems dealing with different domains of relations in the environment, (2) a central representational capacity system, (3) general inferential processes, and (4)…

Learners studying mechanical or technical processes via dynamic visualizations often fail to build an accurate mental representation of the system's movements. Based on embodied theories of cognition assuming that action, perception, and cognition are closely intertwined, this paper proposes that the learning effectiveness of dynamic…

Many studies have examined the importance of teacher-student relationships for the development of children. Much less is known, however, about how these relationships impact the professional and personal lives of teachers. This review considers the importance of teacher-student relationships for the wellbeing of teachers starting from the…