Biological maturation and cognitive skills

Hierarchical Skills and Cognitive Architectures

In this paper, we examine approaches to representing and utilizing hierarchical skills within the context of a cognitive architecture. We review responses to this issue by three established frameworks – ACT-R, Soar, and Prodigy – then present an alternative we have developed within Icarus, another candidate architecture. Unlike most earlier systems, Icarus lets skills refer directly to their su...

Running head: The nature and transfer of cognitive skills The Nature and Transfer of Cognitive Skills

This paper presents the Primitive Elements theory of cognitive skills. The central idea is that skills are broken down into primitive information processing elements that move and compare single pieces of information regardless of the specific content of this information. Several of these primitive elements are necessary for even a single step in a task. A learning process therefore combines th...

Literacy Skills, Non-Cognitive Skills and Earnings: An Economist’s Perspective

Applying cognitive modeling to meta-cognitive skills

The goal of our research is to investigate whether a Cognitive Tutor can be made more effective by extending it to help students acquire help-seeking skills. We present a preliminary model of help-seeking behavior that will provide the basis for a Help-Seeking Tutor Agent. The model, implemented by 57 production rules, captures both productive and unproductive help-seeking behavior. As a first ...

Hard Skills, Soft Skills: The Relative Roles of Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills in Intergenerational Social Mobility

In this article, we adopt a two-step strategy to assess the relative roles of cognitive and noncognitive skills in mediating the relationship between family SES and children’s academic achievement using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort. First, we decompose the total effects of family background on children’s achievement into: (1) direct effects of family back...