Most studies of children and climate change focus on instilling literacy (a ‘top-down’ process), positioning as passive recipients knowledge rather than active agents in shaping their lived realities. Photovoice, a form participatory action research, can help explore how make sense change, while inviting critical reflection, arts-based expression, ‘bottom-up’ process). By qualitatively examinin...

Two studies in different cultures (Study 1: USA, N=174, Study 2: Trinidad, N=167) examined whether meaning making, (i.e., both searching for meaning, and directing behaviour) is positively related to subjective well-being (SWB) by age (younger, older adults). In both studies, participants self-reported engagement in meaning making, and SWB (e.g., affect, future time perspective, psychological w...

Synthetic ethology was developed as a methodology for constructing experiments in which artificial agents could exhibit real (i.e., not simulated) intentionality and other mental phenomena. This report has two purposes. The first is to review the motivations for synthetic ethology as an experimental methodology and to explain how it can be used to investigate intentionality and meaning, and the...

This paper reports on our efforts to deepen the analysis of online collaborative learning. Most studies of online learning use quantitative methods that assign meaning to contributions in isolation and aggregate over many sessions, obscuring the actual procedures by which participants accomplish learning through the affordances of online media. Methods for studying the interactional constructio...

This study was a qualitative exploration of the effect of multiple-choice glosses and periodic second language (L2) text reconstruction on lexical acquisition. L2 readers of German engaged in a think-aloud procedure while reading a short text and retelling its content in German after each of four short sections. In each section, four unfamiliar target words (TWs) were embedded. Half of the part...

Despite the widely accepted belief that meaning making is essential for mental health following adversity, the available research continues to provide mixed findings: meaning making is sometimes evident, sometimes not, and more frequently than we would expect associated with poor health outcomes. The papers that comprise this special issue of Memory put flesh to those bones by approaching the q...

The broad field of “computers in education” includes a diversity of approaches to using computers for learning. Each approach is based on an epistemology: a theory of how knowledge is gained. In this presentation, I will characterize the uses of technology and their corresponding epistemologies. I will single out intersubjective epistemologies as timely for research and practice, and call for d...