Learning the cardinal principle (the last word reached when counting a set represents the size of the whole set) is a major milestone in early mathematics. But researchers disagree about the relationship between cardinal principle knowledge and other concepts, including how counting implements the successor function (for each number word N representing a cardinal value, the next word in the count list represents the cardinal value N + 1) and exact ordering (cardinal values can be ordered such that each is one more than the value before it and one less than the value after it). No studies have investigated acquisition of the successor principle and exact ordering over time, and in relation to cardinal principle knowledge. An open question thus remains: Is the cardinal principle a gatekeeper concept children must acquire before learning about succession and exact ordering, or can these concepts develop separately? Preschoolers (N = 127) who knew the cardinal principle (CP-knowers) or who knew the cardinal meanings of number words up to three or four (3-4-knowers) completed succession and exact ordering tasks at pretest and posttest. In between, children completed one of two trainings: counting only versus counting, cardinal labeling, and comparison. CP-knowers started out better than 3-4-knowers on succession and exact ordering. Controlling for this disparity, we found that CP-knowers improved over time on succession and exact ordering; 3-4-knowers did not. Improvement did not differ between the two training conditions. We conclude that children can learn the cardinal principle without understanding succession or exact ordering and hypothesize that children must understand the cardinal principle before learning these concepts.

Research is needed to understand how best to design online videos that foster learning. This study explored the effects of using transparent whiteboards, which allow the instructor to stand behind a transparent glass board and face the students to write and draw while providing a concurrent explanation of the material. Specifically, the affordances of transparent whiteboard lessons might better follow design principles of multimedia learning and foster social agency compared to conventional whiteboard lessons, thereby promoting learning. In two experiments, college students viewed a 20-min Organic Chemistry video lecture with the instructor using either a conventional whiteboard or a transparent whiteboard. Results indicated that students who viewed transparent whiteboard lessons performed better on immediate posttests (Experiment 1 and 2) at interpreting the configuration of spatial diagrams and at explaining key concepts. Students viewing transparent whiteboard lessons also reported more positive ratings of their lecture experience. However, Experiment 2 indicated that the benefits of learning from transparent whiteboards did not persist on a delayed posttest. Overall, this study provides the first systematic investigation of the effects of using transparent whiteboards in video-based instruction.

Conducted in two sections of an introductory chemistry course, the current study assesses the impact of a partially flipped course compared to traditional lectures on student academic performance, motivation, and perceptions. Although the partially flipped course had little impact on student final exam performance in the current course, it had an overall positive effect on student grades in a subsequent course with presence of interaction effect favoring students with lower high school GPA. By implication, the partially flipped course structure has the potential to bridge the achievement gap over time. Similarly, flipped instruction had an overall positive effect on end-of-quarter student motivation, and academically weaker students showed relatively higher motivation increases. Treatment students rated the flipped course much more positively regarding instructional clarity, instructor quality, and course quality. Compared to the student reflections received in our previous study, negative comments were much less in scope and severity in the current study, owing to a gentler approach for introducing flipped instruction. The gentler approach might allow student to adapt to the format over time. Additionally, greater accountability due to increased assignments of the pre-class work contributed to higher student preparation and improved perceptions.

Previous research has found that early engagement in MOOCs (e.g., watching lectures, contributing to discussion forums, and submitting assignments) can be used to predict course completion and course grade, which may help instructors and administrators to identify at-risk participants and to target interventions. However, most of these analyses have only focused on the average relationships between engagement and achievement, which may mask important heterogeneity among participant subgroups in MOOCs. This study examines how the relationship between engagement and achievement may vary across the four common behaviorally identified participant subgroups (disengagers, auditors, quiz-takers, and all-rounders) in three MOOC courses offered on the Coursera platform. For each of these subgroups, we used measures of behavioral and cognitive engagement from the first half of the ten-week courses to predict two outcomes: course grade and overall lecture coverage. Results indicate that the same engagement measure may be oppositely associated with achievement for different subgroups and that some engagement measures predict achievement for one subgroup but not another. These findings provide insight into both the benefits and the complexity of studying patterns of engagement from behavioral data and provide suggestions on the improvement of identification of at-risk participants in MOOCs.

The main goal of the present research was to test whether the presence of analogies would affect the relative accuracy of metacognitive judgments about learning from expository science texts, and whether any effect would depend on the type of cues that readers used as the basis for their judgments of comprehension. In a series of experiments, students read texts that either contained or did not contain analogies; were asked to judge how well they understood each text; took comprehension tests for each topic; and were asked to self-report the basis for their judgments. Relative metacomprehension accuracy was computed as the intra-individual correlation between judgments and test performance. Results showed that the presence of analogies can lead to poor relative metacomprehension accuracy for students who fail to use situation-model-based cues to judge their understanding of text.

In a previous study, parent-child praise was observed in natural interactions at home when children were 1, 2, and 3 years of age. Children who received a relatively high proportion of process praise (e.g., praise for effort and strategies) showed stronger incremental motivational frameworks, including a belief that intelligence can be developed and a greater desire for challenge, when they were in 2nd or 3rd grade (Gunderson et al., 2013). The current study examines these same children's (n = 53) academic achievement 1 to 2 years later, in 4th grade. Results provide the first evidence that process praise to toddlers predicts children's academic achievement (in math and reading comprehension) 7 years later, in elementary school, via their incremental motivational frameworks. Further analysis of these motivational frameworks shows that process praise had its effect on fourth grade achievement through children's trait beliefs (e.g., believing that intelligence is fixed vs. malleable), rather than through their learning goals (e.g., preference for easy vs. challenging tasks). Implications for the socialization of motivation are discussed.

In the present study, we examined the extent to which grit’s 2 components, consistency of interests and perseverance of effort, overlap with future-oriented motivation, relate to other motivational variables including self-efficacy, task values, and goal orientations, and predict achievement in high school students (N = 190) controlling for motivational variables. Exploratory factor analyses revealed that grit was empirically distinct from, and relatively weakly related to, the future-oriented motivation variables future time perspective and instrumentality. The perseverance of effort component of grit was more strongly correlated with self-efficacy, task values, and goal orientations than was consistency of interests. When controlling for motivational variables, perseverance of effort emerged as a significant predictor of end-of-semester grades, but consistency of interests did not. However, self-efficacy was a stronger predictor of grades than either of the grit components. Together, these results suggest that grit is distinct from future oriented motivation, and that perseverance of effort is more strongly associated with motivation and achievement than is consistency of interests for high school students. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Experiments were conducted in which novice participants learned to classify pictures of rocks into real-world, scientifically defined categories. The experiments manipulated the distribution of training instances during an initial study phase, and then tested for correct classification and generalization performance during a transfer phase. The similarity structure of the to-be-learned categories was also manipulated across the experiments. A low-parameter version of an exemplar-memory model, used in combination with a high-dimensional feature-space representation for the rock stimuli, provided good overall accounts of the categorization data. The successful accounts included (a) predicting how performance on individual item types within the categories varied with the distributions of training examples, (b) predicting the overall levels of classification accuracy across the different rock categories, and (c) predicting the patterns of between-category confusions that arose when classification errors were made. The work represents a promising initial step in scaling up the application of formal models of perceptual classification learning to complex natural-category domains. We discuss further steps for making use of the model and its associated feature-space representation to search for effective techniques of teaching categories in the science classroom.

Recent public discussions have suggested that the under-representation of women in science and mathematics careers can be traced back to intrinsic differences in aptitude. However, true gender differences are difficult to assess because sociocultural influences enter at an early point in childhood. If these claims of intrinsic differences are true, then gender differences in quantitative and mathematical abilities should emerge early in human development. We examined cross-sectional gender differences in mathematical cognition from over 500 children aged 6 months to 8 years by compiling data from five published studies with unpublished data from longitudinal records. We targeted three key milestones of numerical development: numerosity perception, culturally trained counting, and formal and informal elementary mathematics concepts. In addition to testing for statistical differences between boys' and girls' mean performance and variability, we also tested for statistical equivalence between boys' and girls' performance. Across all stages of numerical development, analyses consistently revealed that boys and girls do not differ in early quantitative and mathematical ability. These findings indicate that boys and girls are equally equipped to reason about mathematics during early childhood. Education: No gender differences in children's mathematicsGirls and boys show no cognitive differences in mathematical ability during infancy and early childhood across multiple tasks. To compare boys' and girls' early mathematical thinking, Alyssa Kersey and colleagues at the University of Rochester and University of Pittsburgh examined performance on three milestones of numerical development: numerosity sensitivity, counting range, and early mathematics achievement. Researchers tested not only for statistical differences between boys and girls but also statistical similarities. Across all aspects of early mathematics development, boys and girls exhibited no statistical differences and instead generally showed statistical equivalence. The results suggest that girls and boys begin development with an equivalent cognitive capacity for mathematics.

An emerging literature demonstrates that relevance interventions, which ask students to produce written reflections on how what they are learning relates to their lives, improve student learning outcomes. As part of a randomized evaluation of a relevance intervention (N = 1,978 students from 82 ninth-grade classes), we used Complier Average Causal Effects (CACE) to identify the effect of the intervention on participants who were assigned to the intervention group and were actually compliant with the intervention (i.e., treatment fidelity or compliance). Results revealed larger differences for compliers than noncompliers, although this impact depended on several factors. Implications for the application of CACE models in educational interventions, in general, and relevance interventions, in particular, are discussed.