The goal of this study was to assess the effectiveness of 2 different types of intervention aimed at improving written argumentative synthesis by integrating conflicting information from different sources. Both interventions combined the use of a guide with collaborative practice, but one of them also included explicit strategy instruction. Only…

The increased Simon effect with increasing the ratio of congruent trials may be interpreted by both attention modulation and irrelevant stimulus-response (S-R) associations learning accounts, although the reversed Simon effect with increasing the ratio of incongruent trials provides evidence supporting the latter account. To investigate if…

This study describes the implementation and effects of a 32-week teacher-led spatial reasoning intervention in K-2 classrooms. The intervention targeted spatial visualization skills as an integrated feature of regular mathematics instruction. Compared to an active control group, children in the spatial intervention demonstrated gains in spatial…

Social skills involved in leadership were examined in a problem-solving activity in which 252 Chinese 5th-graders worked in small groups on a spatial-reasoning puzzle. Results showed that students who engaged in peer-managed small-group discussions of stories prior to problem solving produced significantly better solutions and initiated…

Difficulties with rational numbers have been explained by a natural number bias, where concepts of natural numbers are inappropriately applied to rational numbers. Overcoming this difficulty may require a radical restructuring of previous knowledge. In order to capture this development, we examined third- to fifth-grade students' understanding of…

This investigation examined relations between adolescent students' daily and cumulative perceptions of teachers' practice and their experience of autonomy. Two-hundred and eighteen high school science students in 43 classes participated in a 6-week diary study. Multilevel modeling results suggested that perceptions of 8 out of 9 practices…

This study centers upon a piano learning and teaching environment in which beginners and intermediate piano students (N = 48) learning to perform a specific type of staccato were submitted to three different (group-exclusive) teaching conditions: "audio-only" demonstration of the musical task; observation of the teacher's action…

This study describes the experiences of two preservice science teachers as they progress through their respective teacher education programs and uses critical race theory to examine the manner in which conceptions about race and its pedagogical implications change over time. Using a longitudinal case study method, participants' conceptual…

The present article describes two studies that examine the impact of teaching students to use gesture to support spatial thinking in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) discipline of chemistry. In Study 1 we compared the effectiveness of instruction that involved either watching gesture, reproducing gesture, or reading…

From an early age, children show a tendency to map novel labels onto unfamiliar rather than familiar kinds of objects. Accounts of this tendency have not addressed whether children develop a metacognitive representation of what they are doing. In 3 experiments (each N = 48), preschoolers received a test of the "metacognitive disambiguation…

Physically active video games (i.e., exergames), which are a prevalent and popular childhood activity, may have benefits to executive-functioning (EF) skills, as they incorporate both cognitive engagement and physical activity. Acute EF change in 147 7- to 12-year-olds was assessed after participation in a 20-min activity. The between-subjects…

School-entry math achievement is a strong predictor of math achievement through high school. We asked whether reciprocal relations among math achievement, math anxiety, and entity motivational frameworks (believing that ability is fixed and a focus on performance) can help explain these persistent individual differences. We assessed 1st and 2nd…

Young children often endorse explanations of the natural world that appeal to functions or purpose--for example, that rocks are pointy so animals can scratch on them. By contrast, most Western-educated adults reject such explanations. What accounts for this change? We investigated 4- to 5-year-old children's ability to generalize the form of an…

In many decision situations, individuals must actively search information before they can make a satisfying choice. In such instances, individuals must be aware of the fact that not all information may be equally relevant for the choice at hand--thus, individuals should weight information by its respective relevance. We compared children's and…

This study examined whether children 4- and 5-years-old (N = 156) can revise a physical science misconception from different types of picture books. A realistic fiction book and informational book with identical images matched in word count and reading difficulty level were compared to a control book about plants. In the pretest and posttest,…