Past research has shown that readers often fail to notice conflicts in text. In our present study we investigated whether accessing information from multiple documents instead of a single document might alleviate this problem by motivating readers to integrate information. We further tested whether this effect would be moderated by source…

This study used think-aloud methodology to explore undergraduates' spontaneous attention to and use of source information while reading six documents that presented conflicting views on a controversial social scientific issue in a Google-like environment. Results showed that students explicitly and implicitly paid attention to sources of documents…

In two experiments, we examined fourth and fifth graders' comprehension of the source of information in texts presenting controversial issues. In Experiment 1, participants read short texts in which two people presented different arguments regarding an issue. Participants identified who said what and evaluated each source's knowledge of the issue.…

When reading multiple texts about controversial scientific issues, learners must construct a coherent mental representation of the issue based on conflicting information that can be more or less belief-consistent. The present experiment investigated the effects of text-belief consistency on the situation model and memory for text. Students read…

This study examines epistemic thinking in action in order to shed light on the relation between students' personal epistemologies and their online learning practices. The study is based on observations of the learning behaviors of 6th-grade students (n = 38) during two online inquiry tasks. Data were collected through think-aloud protocols and…

Children's estimation patterns on a number line estimation task may provide information about the mental representation of the magnitude of numbers. Siegler and his colleagues concluded that children's mental representations shift from a logarithmic-ruler representation to a linear-ruler representation. However, there are important methodological…

An important goal of history education is the development of a chronological frame of reference that can be used to interpret and date historical images and documents. Despite the importance of this contextualization goal, little is known about the knowledge and strategies that allow students to situate information historically. Two studies were…

Predictions of the Identical Elements (IE) model of arithmetic fact representation (Rickard, 2005; Rickard & Bourne, 1996) about transfer between arithmetic facts were tested in primary school children. The aim of the study was to test whether the IE model, constructed to explain adult performance, also applies to children. The IE model…

A group of 64 Israeli twelfth-grade students of two different ethnic backgrounds participated in an experiment exploring the effects of argumentative design and social identity on the learning of a charged, ethnicity-related historical controversy. Students were divided into two learning conditions: an argumentative-disciplinary condition and a…

This study examines presentations of the distributive property (DP) in two widely used U.S. elementary text series and one main Chinese text series along three dimensions: problem contexts, typical problem types within each problem context, and variability in using the DP. In general, the two U.S. texts were found to resemble each other but to…

We present an empirical study that investigated seventh-, ninth-, and eleventh-grade students' understanding of the infinity of numbers in an interval. The participants (n = 549) were asked how many (i.e., a finite or infinite number of numbers) and what type of numbers (i.e., decimals, fractions, or any type) lie between two rational numbers. The…

This study investigates children's metarepresentational competence with regard to listening to and making sense of simple sonic stimuli. Using diSessa's (2003) work on metarepresentational competence in mathematics and sciences as theoretical and empirical background, it aims to assess children's criteria for representational adequacy of graphical…

This study explored the extent to which parents were able to scaffold their children's Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) in the context of authentic academic tasks and attempted to identify specific dimensions within the parent-child interaction (socioemotional and instructional) that were related to children's SRL. Fifteen Chilean parents and their…

The current study examines the personal epistemology of fourth-grade elementary school teachers from Germany (n = 10) and the United States (n = 10) to gain a more nuanced understanding of teachers' beliefs about knowledge and knowing through a cross-cultural lens. Analyses of semi-structured interviews reveal similarities and differences in the…

Three experiments are reported that investigate the extent to which an authority figure influences the level of persuasion undergraduate students and research-active mathematicians invest in mathematical arguments. We demonstrate that, in some situations, both students and researchers rate arguments as being more persuasive when they are…