From a personal perspective, the author reflects upon the notion that many research findings appear falsely to possess the quality of being “obvious”. Specific attention is given to the topic of teacher effectiveness. The feeling that findings are obvious can be related to the following: the false consensus effect, self-serving cognition, hindsight bias, base-rate neglect, illusory correlations...

This paper reports on a study designed to examine the dialogic processes teachers used to sustain focused discussions, using questioning techniques and Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs). IWBs and their related technologies such as plasma touch screens and projected tablets have passed through several phases of implementation as classroom objects, from initial adoption by a few enthusiasts, through...

Eighty years ago, L. S. Vygotsky complained that psychology was misled in studying thought independent of emotion. This situation has not signifi cantly changed, as most learning scientists continue to study cognition independent of emotion. In this book, the authors use cultural-historical activity theory as a perspective to investigate cognition, emotion, learning, and teaching in mathematics...

Infants exploit the perception that others are 'like me' to bootstrap social cognition (Meltzoff, 2007a). This paper demonstrates how the above theory can be instantiated in a social robot that uses itself as a model to recognize structural similarities with other robots; this thereby enables the student to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate teachers. This is accomplished by the ...

This study investigated the cognition of 70 Tunisian teachers on the place of culture in English education. It showed that Tunisian teachers believe that English textbooks and curricular documents are not specific about the cultural dimension of EFL. It also revealed that L2 teachers, whose mother culture is distant from that associated with L2, hold ambivalent attitudes towards culture. They a...

The performance of school children has been studied by considering partial relationships between several personal variables such as the link between cognition and motivation. However, contextual variables, such as a child's willingness to accept social responsibility, also influence students' social and academic performance. Thus, students with greater responsibility have a better attitude towa...