This paper investigates whether and how regional social contexts influence fertility decisions of women living in western Germany during the 1980s and 1990s. It is argued that regional opportunity structures as well as local patterns of social interaction and culture may translate into parameters that directly affect individual behaviour. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) are li...

Invention activities are Productive Failure activities in which students attempt (and often fail) to invent methods that capture deep properties of a construct before being taught expert solutions. The current study evaluates the effect of scaffolding on the invention processes and outcomes, given that students are not expected to succeed in their inquiry and that all students receive subsequen...

Purpose: This paper outlines a social epistemological and ethical warrant for engaging in knowledge exchange on the social web, and emphasises socio-cognitive and emotional factors behind motivation and credibility in communities supported by social software. An attempt is made to identify positive and negative patterns of interaction from this perspective and to argue for more positive interve...

In this paper we argue for a human-in-the-loop approach to the study of situation awareness in computer defence analysis (CDA). The cognitive phenomenon of situation awareness (SA) has received significant attention in cybersecurity/CDA research. Yet little of this work has attended to the cognitive aspects of situation awareness in the CDA context; instead, the human operator has been treated ...

Data from three experiments provide the first evidence that children, at least as young as age two, are vigilant of others’ nonverbal cues to credibility, and flexibly use these cues to facilitate learning. Experiment 1 revealed that 2and 3-year-olds prefer to learn about objects from someone who appears, through non-verbal cues, to be confident in performing actions on those objects than from ...

CSCL includes a wide range of scenarios that integrate individual and collaborative learning. Scripts have repeatedly proven useful for guiding learners to engage in specific roles and activities in CSCL environments. The effective mechanisms of scripts in stimulating cognitive and collaborative processes, however, are not yet well understood. Moreover, scripts have been shown to be somewhat in...

This paper describes cognitive ethnography as a method of choice for game studies, multimedia learning, professional development, leisure studies, and activities where context is important. Cognitive ethnography is efficacious for these activities, as it assumes that human cognition adapts to its natural surroundings (Hutchins, 1995, 2010) with emphasis on analysis of activities as they happen ...

The United States has become increasingly characterized by stark class divides in family structure. Poor women are less likely to marry than their more affluent counterparts, but far more likely to have a birth outside of marriage. Recent theoretical and qualitative work at the intersection of demography and cultural sociology suggests that these patterns are generated because poor women have h...

This paper investigates whether and how regional social contexts influence fertility decisions of women living in western Germany during the 1980s and 1990s. It is argued that regional opportunity structures as well as local patterns of social interaction and culture may translate into parameters that directly affect individual behaviour. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) are li...

This paper presents an approach to modeling social transgressions in agent based systems. The approach is intended to be abstract enough that it may be used with many different theories of transgression, apology, forgiveness, etc. We discuss an implementation of this approach in PMFserv, an agent based socio-cognitive modeling framework.