Kevin Miller

• University of Michigan

Introduction Classroom teachers need to monitor a group of students varying in interest, knowledge, and behavior at the same time that they present a lesson and adapt it on the fly to student questions and understanding. Many areas of expertise are associated with special kinds of perceptual skills, and teaching presents its own perceptual challeng...

The current study examined whether the suppression of overt attention to a salient distractor requires attentional resources. In a feature-search task, participants searched for a constant shape among different shapes while ignoring a uniquely colored distractor. Trial-by-trial fluctuations in attentional resources were assessed via thought probes...

Instructional videos are widely used to study teachers’ professional vision. A new technological development in video research is mobile eye-tracking (MET). It has the potential to provide fine-grained insights into teachers’ professional vision in action, but has yet been scarcely employed. We addressed this research gap by using MET video feedbac...

During scene viewing, semantic information in the scene has been shown to play a dominant role in guiding fixations compared to visual salience (e.g., Henderson & Hayes, 2017). However, scene viewing is sometimes disrupted by cognitive processes unrelated to the scene. For example, viewers sometimes engage in mind-wandering, or having thoughts unre...

In need of simultaneously tackling various tasks at a fast pace, teaching is a job that requires skillful attention allocation. Selective visual attention forms the basis of teacher's professional vision – the expertise of attending to and interpreting classroom features, but it is also a process mostly hidden from direct observation. Eye tracking...

Recent studies have shown that mind-wandering (MW) is associated with changes in eye movement parameters, but have not explored how MW affects the sequential pattern of eye movements involved in making sense of complex visual information. Eye movements naturally unfold over time and this process may reveal novel information about cognitive processi...

Recent studies have shown that mind-wandering (MW) is associated with changes in eyemovement parameters, but have not explored how MW affects the sequential pattern of eyemovements involved in making sense of complex visual information. Eye movements natu-rally unfold over time and this process may reveal novel information about cognitive process-i...

Mind-wandering (MW) often involves a decoupling between attention and external information (Schooler et al., 2011). The present study examined whether eye movements during MW decouple from image content in a scene perception task. Participants studied real-world scenes and occasionally answered thought probes assessing their attentional states (on-...

Video lectures are increasingly prevalent, but they present challenges to learners. Students' minds often wander, yet we know little about how mind-wandering affects attention during video lectures. Two studies examined eye movement patterns of mind-wandering during video lectures. In both studies, mind-wandering reports were collected by either se...

Mind-wandering (i.e., thoughts irrelevant to the current task) occurs frequently during reading. The current study examined whether mind-wandering was associated with reduced rereading when the reader read the so-called garden-path jokes. In a garden-path joke, the reader's initial interpretation is violated by the final punchline, and the violatio...

The idea of ego-depletion has been examined extensively in western cultures, but cultural background might substantially influence the understanding and effect of the concept. In the present study we used Job et al. (2010) Implicit Theories on Willpower Questionnaire to examine whether Chinese college students, compared to United States students, a...

2019, American Psychological Association. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the final, authoritative version of the article. Please do not copy or cite without authors' permission. The final article will be available, upon publication, via its DOI: 10.1037/xlm0000745 Mind-wandering, or thoughts irrelevant to the cur...

Traditional video technology used in teacher education focuses on the teacher and usually records the video from the perspective of a student in the classroom. In this pilot study, we demonstrate that viewing a sequence of classroom teaching from the perspective of the teacher provides a different feedback perspective for teachers in training. 23 s...

1. Reading under irrelevant speech shows a distinct pattern of impairment compared with other distractions such as Mindless Reading. 2. Irrelevant speech leads to increased fixation duration, fixation count, regressions, off-text fixations, pupil size, and blinks, compared to reading in silence. 3. Irrelevant speech increased both the word frequenc...

Lectures present learners with dilemmas of where to attend and how to maintain attention over extended periods of time. Learning from video lectures is susceptible to mind-wandering (MW), a mental state where attention is decoupled from the external task. Two studies looked at how MW during video lectures is reflected in changes in eye movements. I...

In a garden-path joke, the initial semantic set-up is violated by the final punchline (e.g., "My girlfriend has read so many negative things about smoking, therefore she decided to quit reading"). Resolving this incongruity requires cognitive effort. The current study used eye-tracking to show that mind-wandering (both intentional and unintentional...

The current research looked at how listening to music affects eye movements when college students read natural passages for comprehension. Two studies found that effects of music depend on both frequency of the word and dynamics of the music. Study 1 showed that lexical and linguistic features of the text remained highly robust predictors of lookin...

Background Disruptions of reading processes due to text substitutions can measure how readers use lexical information. Methods With eye‐movement recording, children and adults viewed sentences with either identical, orthographically similar, homophonic or unrelated substitutions of the first characters in target words. To the extent that readers r...

Academic self-concept (ASC) and achievement are generally seen as mutually reinforcing and hence positively correlated. However, international comparisons have found negative associations between academic self-concept and achievement when country averages are compared. One possible explanation for this paradox is the ‘modesty bias’, which refers to...

Prior research has found strong and persistent effects of instructor first impressions on student evaluations. Because these studies look at real classroom lessons, this finding fits two different interpretations: (1) first impressions may color student experience of instruction regardless of lesson quality, or (2) first impressions may provide val...

In two experiments, we explored whether anecdotal stories influenced how individuals reasoned when evaluating scientific news articles. We additionally considered the role of education level and thinking dispositions on reasoning. Participants evaluated eight scientific news articles that drew questionable interpretations from the evidence. Overall...

Classroom observation research and research on teacher expertise are similar in their reliance on observational data with high-inference procedure to assess the quality of instruction. Expertise research usually uses low-inference measures like eye tracking to identify qualitative difference between expert and novice behaviors and cognition. In thi...

Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West. By JinLi. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xiv, 385 pp. $99.00 (cloth); $34.99 (paper). - Volume 73 Issue 1 - Kevin F. Miller, Heidi Phillips

As part of professional development training for mathematic teachers, we used a speech recognition recorder (Language ENvironment Analysis, LENA) to create an automated teacher feedback system to help teachers monitor and limit the time they talk and to increase students’ active participation in mathematics lessons. Teachers got feedback with a 12h...

Improving mathematics and science education in the United States has been a matter of national concern for over half a century. Psychology has a vital role to play in this enterprise. In this article, the authors review the kinds of contributions that psychology can make in four areas: (a) early understanding of mathematics, (b) understanding of sc...

As children become proficient readers, there are substantial changes in the eye movements that subserve reading. Some of these changes reflect universal developmental factors while others may be specific to a particular writing system. This study attempts to disentangle effects of universal and script-dependent factors by comparing the development...

This study investigated variation in students’ behavioral engagement across mathematics classes in China and the United States. Student behavioral engagement was examined along with two aspects of the classroom (group size and teacher instructions given about classroom behavior). Video observational data were collected and coded over 1051 time inte...

(from the chapter) The productivity of any modern society rests heavily on the success of its educational system in preparing its children to become skilled and engaged adults. The major conceptual frameworks developed within developmental science in the early to mid-20th century serve today as the source of inspiration and knowledge for teachers a...

This study compares US and Chinese elementary mathematics teachers' beliefs about how students learn mathematics. Interviews with teachers in each country revealed that Chinese and US teachers have distinct ways of thinking about how mathematics should be taught and how students learn. Many Chinese teachers talked about developing students’ interes...

The authors investigated the use of a particular discourse practice--continued questioning and discussion after a correct answer was provided, which they called extended discourse--and examined the frequency and content of this practice in 17 Chinese and 14 U.S. elementary mathematics classes. They found that the Chinese classrooms had more, and...

Video-based techniques have become central to many areas of social science research, although their use has been limited by the expense and complexity of tools for working with video information. New standards for the representation of digital video make the manipulation of video for observational research a far less time-consuming and expensive pr...

This chapter will focus on identifying the nature of differences in mathematical competence that exist as children begin formal schooling. Schooling may well serve to exacerbate these differences (see Stevenson & Stigler, 1992, for a review of factors related to cross-national achievement differences in later years), but our concern here will be on...

Children develop a conscious understanding of aspects of their native language along the way to developing literacy. To the extent that these concepts are based on specific orthographic experience rather than reflecting general developmental processes, the developmental course of metalinguistic awareness should differ as a function of the specific...

To examine how readers of Chinese and English take advantage of orthographic and phonological features in reading, the authors investigated the effects of spelling errors on reading text in Chinese and English using the error disruption paradigm of M. Daneman and E. Reingold (1993). Skilled readers in China and the United States read passages in th...

Previous research has demonstrated cross-language variation in early counting associated with linguistic differences in number-naming systems. Ordinal number names are typically learned later than cardinal names, but languages also differ in the regularity with which they form these names. Elementary school children in China and the U.S. showed dif...

We interpret the world and its regularities through representations and procedures that are a complex mélange of formal experience, rules of thumb, and naive concepts that precede formal education. These representational tools give us the language in which we can think about science. Three propositions are argued: (a) that such tools are fundamenta...

Unlike English, Chinese uses a numerical system for naming months and days. This study explored whether this difference in naming affects the development of simple calendar calculation. Eight- and 10-year-old children as well as undergraduates in China and the United States were asked to name the day or month that comes a specified time before or a...

The topic of reasoning and problem solving is so broad and encompasses such a vast literature that it would be impossible to cover all the research that fits under this commodious umbrella in any one chapter. Hence, we have limited our scope and focus in several ways, governed both by conceptual and practical considerations. The major narrowing of...

Becoming a proficient symbol user is a universal developmental task in the first years of life, but detecting and mentally representing symbolic relations can be quite challenging for young children To test the extent to which symbolic reasoning per se is problematic, we compared the performance of 2 1/2-year-olds in symbolic and nonsymbolic versio...

Differences in mathematical competence between U S and Chinese children first emerge during the preschool years, favor Chinese children, and are limited to specific aspects of mathematical competence The base-10 structure of number names is less obvious in English than in Chinese, differences between these languages are reflected in children's diff...

R. E. Mayer et al (see record 1991-19796-001) reported that US students scored higher on problem-solving tasks than their Japanese peers when matched on computation skills. Contrary to Mayer et al, the authors believe that these results are artifacts that reveal little about the nature of Japanese and US education. Drawing on work by P. E. Meehl (...

"Why do we call something a 'number'? Well, perhaps because it has a -direct-relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fiber on fiber. And the strength of...

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books , 1991, Vol 36(11), 956-958. Reviews the book, Time and Human Cognition: A Life-Span Perspective by Iris Levin and Dan Zakay (Eds.) (1989). This fascinating book provides an opportunity to consider how the various streams of research on developmental changes in the understanding a...

Research on expertise has focused on the amount and organization of domain-relevant knowledge as the key feature distinguishing experts from novices. The representations of experts are described as being more functionally organized as well as more detailed than those of novices. There are two different senses in which knowledge could become more fu...

The English language forms names for two digit numbers beginning with one (i.e., “teens”) using different rules than those used for naming larger two-digit numbers. The distinction between teens and other two-digit numbers was explored in four studies that looked at adult subjects' ability to form reverse numbers, defined as the number resulting fr...

A major stumbling block in acquiring a new skill can be integrating it with old but related knowledge. Learning multiplication is a case in point, because it involves integrating new relations with previously acquired arithmetic knowledge (in particular, addition). Two studies explored developmental changes in the relations between single-digit add...

Tachistoscopic presentation of stimuli on IBM PC-compatible computers is limited by a number of factors, including video retrace rates, screen scrolling, and the shape and density of picture elements. A method is presented for overcoming these difficulties through the use of enhanced graphic adapters or video graphic arrays. A C-language program de...

Computer-controlled experiments present a number of potential sources of error in timing the presentation of events, including video refresh rate, keyboard scanning rate, and disk I/O times. A terminate-and-stay-resident routine implementing multiple millisecond-accuracy timers is presented. Interfaces permitting use of the timer with several highe...

Preschoolers often assert that objects become closer together when part of the distance between them is occluded (occlusion = nearer). Piaget argued that this is due to young children's use of a topological spatial representation. Three studies explored the occlusion = nearer phenomenon. In Study 1, children who asserted that occlusion = nearer non...

Relations between measuring procedures (e.g., counting, aligning) and children's reasoning about amount were explored in two studies. The first compared traditional conservation-like measures with new tasks reflecting the procedures used to measure number, length, and area. Children's judgments of quantitative equivalence did not indicate a general...

Learning to count is an early and important cognitive accomplishment implicated in the development of later mathematical abilities. Research on the development of counting (e.g., Gelman & Gallistel, 1978) has focused on the way that children's understanding of number guides the task of learning to count. Because counting requires use of a number sy...

One need not look far to find spatial analogies applied to phenomena that are not inherently spatial. Terms with a spatial flavor, such as “close friends,” “deep problems,” “knowing one’s way around,” or “one need not look far” are used with neither literal referents nor ambiguity. This ready metaphorical use of spatial relations led Lakoff and Joh...

A general orientation toward the study of skills and their development is outlined, in which analyses of representation, transfer, and context are used to explore the consequences of developing a specific skill. This general approach is then applied to the study of abacus training and its implications for school achievement and cognitive developmen...

Conducted 2 studies to investigate children's conceptions of the number zero. In Exp I, 57 3–7 yr olds were tested. Findings show that Ss understood that zero is a number among other numbers with its own unique value, namely nothing. Ss' achievement of this understanding occurred in 3 phases. At each phase, understanding of zero lagged behind compa...

Adults' performance of simple arithmetic calculations (addition, multiplication, and numerical comparison) was examined to test predictions of digital (counting), analog, and network models. Although all of these models have been supported by studies of mental addition, each leads to a different prediction concerning relations between the times req...

Examined 6 graduate students' performance of simple arithmetic calculations to test predictions of digital (counting), analog, and network models. Pairs of single-digit integers were presented and RTs for adding, multiplying, and comparing the stimuli were collected. A high correlation between RTs for addition and multiplication of the same digits...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Minnesota, 1982. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 148-152).

In order to describe developments in children's conceptions of numbers and numerical relations, judgments of similarities between numbers were solicited from adults and from children in kindergarten and grades 3 and 6. A nonmetric multidimensional scaling analysis suggested that children gradually become sensitive to an expanding set of numerical r...

Younger (mean age = 20 years) and older (mean age = 64 years) adults were tested on spatial and temporal memory tasks. No age difference was observed on the temporal task but older adults performed worse than younger adults on the spatial task. The absence of an age-related decline in performance on the temporal task is counter to most previous dev...

Younger (mean age = 20) and older (mean age = 64) adults were asked to recall the dates and make recency judgments for historical events that occurred in each of three time periods between 1862 and 1977. Overall there were no age differences in either the number of correct dates or the number of correct recency judgments. However, younger adults te...