Teachers can play critical roles in challenging or reinscribing dominant narratives about what counts as STEM, who is seen within STEM disciplines, and how these disciplines should be taught. However, teachers have often experienced STEM in limited ways in their own education and are thereby provided with few resources for re-imagining these…

After three decades of scholarship describing why and how students ought to be taught to think historically, this study asks what happens when they are. Ten high school students from a school that incorporated historical thinking into all history coursework repeated the think-aloud task from Wineburg's 1991 study of the cognitive processes…

Research has focused on students' difficulties understanding phenomena in which agency is distributed across actors whose individual-level behaviors converge to result in collective outcomes. Building on Levy and Wilensky (2008), this study identified features of distributed causality students understand and that may offer affordances for…

We explored a two-stage recognition memory paradigm in which people first make single-item "studied"/"not studied" decisions and then have a chance to correct their errors in forced-choice trials. Each forced-choice trial included one studied word ("target") and one nonstudied word ("lure") that received the…

Students learn more effectively through repeated retrieval of study materials relative to repeated exposure to the materials, a phenomenon known as the "testing effect" or "retrieval practice". This pattern has been demonstrated repeatedly with verbal materials, and more recently with visuospatial materials. The extent to which…

Adults automatically infer a person's social disposition and future behavior based on the many properties they observe about how they look and sound. The goal of the current study is to explore the developmental origins of this bias. We tested whether 12-month-old infants automatically infer a character's social disposition (e.g., whether they are…

This study investigated longitudinal pathways leading from early spatial skills in first-grade girls to their fifth-grade analytical math reasoning abilities (N = 138). First-grade assessments included spatial skills, verbal skills, addition/subtraction skills, and frequency of choice of a decomposition or retrieval strategy on the…

One perennially important question for theories of sentence comprehension is whether the human sentence processing mechanism is "parallel" (i.e., it simultaneously represents multiple syntactic analyses of linguistic input) or "serial" (i.e., it constructs only a single analysis at a time). Despite its centrality, this question…

A word's predictability, as measured by its cloze probability, has a robust influence on the time a reader's eyes spend on the word, with more predictable words receiving shorter fixations. However, several previous studies using the boundary paradigm have found no apparent effect of predictability on early reading time measures when the reader…

While it is sometimes claimed that abstract art requires little skill and is indistinguishable from the scribbles of young children, recent research has shown that even adults with no training in art can distinguish works by abstract expressionists from superficially similar works by children and even elephants, monkeys, and apes (Hawley-Dolan…

The two-high-threshold (2HT) model of recognition memory assumes that people make memory errors because they fail to retrieve information from memory and make a guess, whereas the continuous unequal-variance (UV) model and the low-threshold (LT) model assume that people make memory errors because they retrieve misleading information from memory.…

Past research has shown that children recognize emotions from facial expressions poorly and improve only gradually with age, but the stimuli in such studies have been static faces. Because dynamic faces include more information, it may well be that children more readily recognize emotions from dynamic facial expressions. The current study of…

A crucial component of numerical understanding is one's ability to abstract numerical properties regardless of varying perceptual attributes. Evidence from numerical match-to-sample tasks suggests that children find it difficult to match sets based on number in the face of varying perceptual attributes, yet it is unclear whether these findings are…

When encountering new people for a brief instant, some seem to last in our memories while others are quickly forgotten. "Memorability"-whether a stimulus is likely to be later remembered-is highly consistent across different group of observers; people tend to remember and forget the same face images. However, is memorability intrinsic to…

Theories of visual narrative understanding have often focused on the changes in meaning across a sequence, like shifts in characters, spatial location, and causation, as cues for breaks in the structure of a discourse. In contrast, the theory of visual narrative grammar posits that hierarchic "grammatical" structures operate at the…