Lucia Mason

University of Padova | UNIPD · Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialisation

Natural environments are beneficial for cognitive functioning and affect. Appraisals of such benefits can lead to the development of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors in the long run. This study aimed to investigate the effects of an indirect exposure to a natural and urban environment during a short break in a school day, using a ‘green’ v...

Background Digital texts are progressively becoming the medium of learning for students, but research has indicated that students tend to process information more superficially while reading on screen. It is therefore relevant to examine what strategies can support digital text comprehension. Objectives This study aimed to investigate the effects...

The positive impact of short-term exposure to nature during a green recess in a school day is documented in the literature. In this study we investigated cognitive, academic, and affective effects of a single contact with nature during a regular school lesson in the greenness, compared to an usual classroom lesson, on young students in second and t...

Background Text comprehension research in relation to the reading medium showed that digital‐based reading represents a disadvantage compared with paper‐based reading. Most paper versus screen research; however, was conducted with university students. Objectives This study investigated the contribution of reading medium to text comprehension and m...

Research on text comprehension in relation to the reading medium (paper or screen) has mainly involved undergraduate or high school students. To advance current knowledge on the effects of reading medium, this longitudinal study focused on beginner readers, specifically, the role of precursors in first graders' comprehension of narrative and exposi...

Students more than ever learn from online sources, such as digital texts or videos. Little research has compared processes and outcomes across these two mediums. Using a between-participants experimental design, this study investigated whether medium (texts vs. videos) and context (less authoritative vs. more authoritative), independently and in co...

This study examines the effectiveness of two short-term instructional interventions on the evaluation of digital sources in the classroom context. One hundred sixty-one 8 th graders were involved in one of three conditions: an intervention based on providing declarative knowledge (DK) on source evaluation, an intervention based on providing contras...

There is growing interest recently in the outdoor environment surrounding schools where students spent time during breaks, in-school activities, and after-school programs. Several reviews have examined the impact of long-term exposures to nearby nature on students’ academic achievement, but none has focused on the effects of short-term contacts wit...

The COVID-19 outbreak has ravaged all societal domains, including education. Home confinement, school closures, and distance learning impacted students, teachers, and parents’ lives worldwide. In this study, we aimed to examine the impact of COVID-19-related restrictions on Italian and Portuguese students’ academic motivation as well as investigate...

Background: An interplay of emotional and cognitive aspects underlies academic performance. We focused on the contribution of such interplay to text comprehension. Aims: We investigated the effect of worry on comprehension and the role of two potential moderators of this effect: physiological self-regulation as resting heart rate variability (HR...

Background: Online multiple-text comprehension is a key skill of the 21st Century, yet the study of its relations with boredom in young students has been disregarded. Boredom is an achievement emotion expected to be predicted negatively by antecedents like control and value appraisals and to be associated to a negative performance. Notwithstanding...

Background: To be successful, students must learn to deal with socially and cognitively demanding tasks. Much remains unknown about the effects of previous classroom experiences and of students' emotional appraisal of a task on their physiological adaptive responses to it. Aims: To investigate how children's physiological response to a social an...

Recent research about the learning of science has suggested that misconceptions are not replaced by scientific conceptions and extinguished once conceptual change has occurred. Rather, misconceptions still exist alongside the acquired scientific conceptions and must be suppressed in order to use scientific conceptions. Our goal in this review is to...

The COVID-19 outbreak has ravaged all societal domains, including education. Home confinement, school closures, and distance learning impacted students, teachers, and parents’ lives worldwide. In this study, we aimed to examine the impact of COVID-19-related restrictions on Italian and Portuguese students’ academic motivation as well as investigate...

Inhibition is thought to help suppress interference from misconceptions in science learning. Using a pre-, post-, and delayed posttest design, we examined the influence on learning from science texts of three inhibitory-related functions—prepotent response inhibition, resistance to distractor interference, and resistance to proactive interference....

The present study investigated the influence of media (text, video, or subtitled video) on students’ learning outcomes. Past studies have raised concerns about the effectiveness of learning from online videos over content-equivalent texts. Moreover, subtitled videos place additional demands on learning. Two-hundred and forty-seven undergraduate stu...

Reading comprehension is one of several vital activities necessary to success in contemporary formal education systems. This study aims to investigate the links between the three achievement emotions of enjoyment, anxiety, and boredom, and their control-value antecedents to reading comprehension. One hundred and fifty-two 5th graders completed a se...

Lay Description What is already known about this topic Multiple‐text comprehension requires readers to construct both an intertext model and an integrated mental model. The process of reading various texts on the same topic can be traced by physiological and behavioural data. Skin conductance level is an index of physiological arousal. First‐ and s...

Background: Reading comprehension can be considered the main learning activity. All learning experiences are infused with emotions; however, to date, few studies have focused on the role of emotional aspects in reading comprehension performance. The impact of emotions on academic achievement is thought to be mediated or moderated by cognitive aspec...

The current study investigated profiles of vagal withdrawal in response to a challenging task in preschoolers. Also, the association between those profiles and conceptual shifting ability was assessed. Electrocardiogram of 43 four‐year‐olds was registered during a sequence of games including a win phase and a lose phase, while conceptual shifting a...

This study investigated early adolescents’ psychophysiological response to a school-related stressor (SRS) as indexed by heart rate variability and examined the unique and interactive effects of heart rate variability and temperament on academic achievement. A total of 91 seventh graders watched an SRS video-clip while their heart rate variability...

The present study aimed to investigate the role of classroom climate and self‐regulation in terms of cardiac vagal tone and inhibitory control in primary school students' focused attention. A combination of direct and indirect measures was used to assess classroom climate, sustained and selective attention, and inattention behaviors among 62 first...

Background: Children's ability to remain focused on a task despite the presence of emotionally salient distractors in the environment is crucial for successful learning and academic performance. Aims: This study investigated first-graders' allocation of attentional resources in the presence of distracting emotional, school-related social interac...

This study aimed to investigate psychophysiological responses while reading multiple webpages on a debated topic. We measured heart rate (HR) as an index of emotional arousal and heart rate variability (HRV) as an index of emotional regulation. Forty-seven lower secondary school students in grade 7 read four webpages varying for reliability and pos...

This study aimed to investigate undergraduates' cardiac activity during an episode of complex learning from text. Specifically, we examined (a) heart rate (HR) and (b) heart rate variability (HRV) as psychophysiological measures while students read a science text and were tested on it. Reading goals were also taken into account: Students were asked...

Text is the primary tool to learn disciplinary knowledge in school. Text-based learning is shaped by a complex interplay between the text and reader characteristics. This study examined the role of text structure and inhibition in conceptual learning about energy. Inhibition implies the ability to block dominant but inappropriate responses automati...

This study focused on middle school students' source evaluation skills as a key component of digital literacy. Specifically, it examined the role of two unexplored individual factors that may affect the evaluation of sources providing information about the controversial topic of the health risks associated with the use of mobile phones. The factors...

This study investigated the role of basal cardiac activity and inhibitory control at the beginning of the school year in predicting oral comprehension at the end of the year in pre-schoolers. Forty-three, 4-year-olds participated in the study. At the beginning of the school year children's electrocardiogram at rest was registered followed by the as...

This study investigates the role of students' dispositional emotion reactivity in the comprehension of conflicting online information about the topic of health risks associated with the use of mobile phones. Arousal was measured by changes in electrodermal activity as a physiological response to an emotionally negative school-related video. Emotion...

Using a dot-probe detection task, this longitudinal study investigated whether adolescents show an attentional bias for academic stressors at the beginning of the school year (T1), and if such allocation of attention interacts with classroom climate (CC) to predict grades and socioemotional functioning at the end of the term (T2). Among 133 eighth-...

This study used eye movement modeling examples (EMME) to support students' integrative processing of verbal and graphical information during the reading of an illustrated text. EMME consists of a replay of eye movements of a model superimposed onto the materials that are processed for accomplishing the task. Specifically, the study investigated the...

Refutation text is potentially more effective than standard text for conceptual change. Learning from text and graphic is also potentially superior to learning from text alone. In two studies, we investigated the effectiveness of both a refutation text and a refutation graphic for promoting high school students’ conceptual change learning about sea...

In this study, we used eye‐tracking methodology for deeper understanding of the refutation text effect on online text comprehension. A refutation text acknowledges the reader's alternative conceptions about a phenomenon, refutes them and presents the correct conceptions. We tested two hypotheses about its facilitation effect: the coherence hypothes...

Factors related to grade point average ( GPA ) are of great importance for students' success. Yet, little is known about the impact of individual differences in emotional reactivity on students' academic performance. We aimed to examine the emotional reactivity– GPA link and to assess whether self‐esteem and psychological distress moderate this rel...

Background: Previous research indicates that children can display different attention allocation patterns in response to threat. However, data are lacking on the possible existence of an attentional bias in response to academic stressors, and whether variables related to school well-being (SWB) and students' individual characteristics may influenc...

Previous research indicates that externalizing problems and negative mood can impair learning. However, the interaction between these variables in predicting learning from text is not well understood. This study examined the moderating role of negative mood in the association between externalizing behaviors and learning from text in primary school...

Printed or digital textbooks contain texts accompanied by various kinds of visualisation. Successful comprehension of these materials requires integrating verbal and graphical information. This study investigates the time course of processing an illustrated text through eye-tracking methodology in the school context. The aims were to identify patte...

Background Previous research has indicated that mood influences cognitive processes. However, there is scarce data regarding the link between everyday emotional states and readers' text processing and comprehension.AimWe aim to extend current research on the effects of mood induction on science text processing and comprehension, using eye-tracking...

This study used an eye-movement modelling example (EMME) in the school context to corroborate and extend recent findings about the educational potential of eye-tracking technology for supporting strategic processing and learning from an illustrated text. Sixty-four seventh graders were randomly assigned to the modelling and non-modelling conditions...

Integrative processing of verbal and graphical information is crucial when students read an illustrated text to learn from it. This study examines the potential of a novel approach to support the processing of text and graphics. We used eye movement modeling example (EMME) in the school context to model students' integrative processes of verbal and...

The study aimed to extend current research on conditions that better support analogical encoding through mutual alignment. We focused on two variables that have not been examined independently in previous studies: the joint presentations of two cases of a scientific phenomenon and the explicit instructions for comparison. One hundred and sixty-five...

Students search the Web frequently for many purposes, one of which is to search information for academic assignments. Given the huge amount of easily accessible online information, they are required to develop new reading skills and become more able to effectively evaluate the reliability of web sources. This study investigates the distribution of...

This study examines the effectiveness of a short-term instructional intervention in the school context. The aim was to provide students with essential declarative knowledge on what to consider when evaluating the authoritativeness of Web sources, and the accuracy of their information. It also provided the opportunity to apply this declarative knowl...

This study extends current research on the refutation text effect by investigating it in learners with different levels of working memory capacity. The purpose is to outline the link between online processes (revealed by eye fixation indices) and off-line outcomes in these learners. In science education, unlike a standard text, a refutation text ac...

The perceptual and cognitive processing demands involved in comprehending complex animations can pose considerable challenges to learners. There is a tendency for learners to extract information that is highly perceptually salient but neglect less conspicuous information of crucial relevance to the building of a quality mental model. This study inv...

This study investigated the online process of reading and the offline learning from an illustrated science text. The authors examined the effects of using a concrete or abstract picture to illustrate a text and adopted eye-tracking methodology to trace text and picture processing. They randomly assigned 59 eleventh-grade students to 3 reading condi...

This study investigated the effects of reading a science text illustrated by either a labeled or unlabeled picture. Both the online process of reading the text and the offline conceptual learning from the text were examined. Eye-tracking methodology was used to trace text and picture processing through indexes of first- and second-pass reading or i...

a b s t r a c t This study used eye-tracking methodology in the school setting to examine fourth graders' online pro-cessing of text and graphics while reading an illustrated science text. We were interested in identifying patterns of visual behavior, which was examined considering individual differences in reading comprehension, prior knowledge, a...

The question of theory change is crucial in knowledge construction, particularly in the process of conceptual change. This study was designed to investigate two factors that, in addition to initial theory preference, may play a crucial role in the process of theory change, that is, students' interpretation of anomalous data on two controversial top...

This study examines the contribution of learner cognitive and motivational characteristics to achievement in science at three grade levels. Specifically, the relations between domain-specific epistemic beliefs about the development and justification of scientific knowledge, achievement goals, knowledge, self-concept, self-efficacy, and achievement...

This study examined whether reading a refutational or non-refutational text would induce different cognitive processing, as revealed by eye-movement analyses. Unlike a standard expository text, a refutational text acknowledges a reader’s alternative conceptions about a topic, refutes them, and then introduces scientific conceptions as viable altern...

In the present study it was investigated whether high school students are spontaneously able to reflect epistemologically during online searching for information about a controversial topic. In addition, we examined whether activating epistemic beliefs is related to individual characteristics, such as prior knowledge of the topic and argumentative...

Students are making an increased use of the Web as a source for solving information problems for academic assignments. To extend current research about search behavior during navigation on the Web, this study examined whether students are able to spontaneously reflect, from an epistemic perspective, on the information accessed, and whether their ep...

This study examined epistemic metacognition as a reflective activity about knowledge and knowing in the context of online information searching on the Web, and whether it was related to prior knowledge on the topic, study approach, and domain-specific beliefs about science. In addition, we investigated whether Internet-based learning was influenced...

The aim of this study was to go further than considering only cognitive factors to extend the understanding of the complex, dynamic underlying knowledge revision processes. Fifth graders were assigned to 2 reading conditions. Participants in 1 condition read a refutational text about light, whereas participants in the other read a traditional text....

After Perry’s (1969) pioneering work, research on the psychology of epistemic beliefs, that is, personal beliefs about knowledge and knowing (Hofer & Pintrich, 2002), has flourished since the beginning of the 1990s. At least three major lines of investigation can be identified in the literature, the first of which deals with the development of epis...

“I believe that he/she is telling the truth”, “I know about the solar system”: what epistemic criteria do students use to distinguish between knowledge and beliefs? If knowing and believing are conceptually distinguishable, do students of different grade levels use the same criteria to differentiate the two constructs? How do students understand th...

This article reports a theoretically based study on the model of development of epistemological understanding proposed by Kuhn (2000) [Kuhn, D. (2000). Theory of mind, metacognition, and reasoning: A life-span perspective. In P. Mitchell & K. J. Riggs (Eds.), Children's reasoning and the mind (pp. 301–326). Hove, UK: Psychology Press], which includ...

Two dimensions of students’ beliefs about meaning construction in reading processes, transmission and transaction beliefs, were studied. According to transmission beliefs, the reader’s task is to understand the author’s intended meaning, while transaction beliefs assign to the reader the role of active meaning constructor. Students’ beliefs were as...

This study focuses on the contribution of overall epistemological understanding to argumentation skills, after controlling for topic knowledge and interest, in eighth graders. Students were introduced to two controversial topics, global warming and genetically modified food, through the reading of a two-sided text on each topic. After reading, stud...

The purpose of this study was to extend previous research on the conditions that may promote understanding and abstraction via structural alignment, that is, through a comparison between two partially understood situations. Structural alignment is a route to analogical reasoning which differs from the typical route where an analogy is made by elici...

This paper introduces a study aimed at ascertaining students’ beliefs about mathematics and mathematical learning, as well as developing those beliefs and related variables by changing the classroom learning environment. Eighty-six fifth graders were involved, divided in two groups: one in the innovative learning environment (N=46) and the other in...

This study focuses on the influence of high school students' (10th and 11th grade) epistemological understanding and topic interest on their interpretation of a dual-position expository text about genetically modified food, as well as on the change in their beliefs about the topic. After reading, students were given different tasks: (1) to write a...

The effects of topic knowledge, text coherence, and topic interest on learning from text were examined. One hundred sixty high school students participated in 1 of 4 groups according to their levels of topic knowledge and interest. Participants read 1 of 3 versions of a scientific text: minimally coherent, locally coherent, and locally and globally...

The main aim of the study reported in this paper was to identify Italian high school students' ( n =599) beliefs about maths and mathematical problem solving by exploring the use of a 36-item (six scales) self-report questionnaire. The study was also aimed at analysing possible significant differences in beliefs related to grade (five years of scho...

This chapter focuses on the development of personal epistemologies as an essential condition for conceptual change. Starting from the distinction of the terms “knowledge” and “belief” in literature, it introduces first the epistemic level of cognition which affects learning. Key issues from cognitive development and educational psychology research...

Contributors. Preface. Introduction M. Limon, L. Mason. Part I: Theoretical Perspectives. The Processes and Challenges of Conceptual Change M.T.H. Chi, R.D. Roscoe. Why 'Conceptual Ecology' is a Good Idea A.A. diSessa. On the Nature of Naive Physics S. Vosniadou. Map Reading Versus Mind Reading: Revisiting Children's Understanding of the Shape of t...

In this commentary, key issues pertaining to research on persuasion and conceptual change are described. To link these two separate lines of research, several questions are raised and addressed. They concern the legitimacy and aims of persuasive discourse in educational contexts, the complex interplay of message and person characteristics, and the...

This qualitative study was concerned with the role of anomalous data on controversial topics in the process of theory change. Its main aim was to identify the types of reasons that eighth graders gave for accepting or refusing evidence conflicting with their held theory and to see whether those types of reasons fitted into the taxonomy of responses...

As a naturalistic inquiry, this study has investigated in the learning environment of a class of fourth-graders the introduction of talk and writing to stimulate and sustain conceptual change in a science domain. During the implementation of ecological curriculum units, talk for learning characterised small- and large-group discussions about a know...

In a brief summary, the debate concerning the nature of writing processes is about whether the essential characteristic of expertise in writing is a matter of mastering problem-solving strategies. In this respect, the role of social and interactive factors, such as writers' familiarity with the particular genre in which they are writing and their r...

This chapter is focused on writing to develop thinking and reasoning about complex phenomena in the elementary school. It introduces a study aimed at investigating whether writing as a learning tool could be used by students first for understanding in history and then for understanding in science by transferring a disposition toward writing as a me...

This introductory chapter begins with a brief historical account of the writing-to-learn movement, emphasising especially the significance of the cognitive revolution for the development of both teaming research and writing research. The next section considers those theories of the writing process which have had the most profound impact on writing-...

The question of theory change is crucial in knowledge construction, particularly in the process of conceptual change. This study was designed to investigate two factors that, in addition to initial theory preference, may play a crucial role in the process of theory change, that is, students' interpretation of anomalous data on two controversial top...

This study was focused on elementary school students'processes of scientific understanding within aclassroom environment characterized as a community ofdiscourse. In particular, it explored the role ofwritten discourse both on the plane of knowledgedevelopment and the conceptualization and evaluationof the writing activity itself. The purposes of t...

In environmental education the construction of appropriate knowledge is not enough, but is undoubtedly a fundamental component of individual and collective environmental responsiveness. The aim of this study was to investigate fifth graders' changes of conceptions about the greenhouse effect and global warming, due to socio‐cognitive interaction de...

This descriptive study is part of a wider research project on learning environments in the classroom that can promote conceptual change in science domains. It investigated the role of talking-to-learn in small- and large-group discussions about a knowledge object and writing-to-learn in individual time after collaborative reasoning and arguing. The...

This study investigated fourth graders’ self‐generated analogies, that is, own analogies giving self‐explanations — opposed to analogies provided by a teacher — and the effects of their collaborative reasoning and arguing over these analogies on individual understanding of three scientific phenomena concerning air pressure. At the beginning the chi...

This descriptive paper presents findings from an analysis of fifth graders’ classroom discussions aimed at constructing shared knowledge on biological and ecological topics. A Vygotskian frame of reference was used that assumes reasoning in children is externalized through discussing and reasoning with others. This analysis of peer discourse‐reason...

This study presents the results of an experiment which investigated analogical reasoning in knowledge acquisition in a natural school setting. The aims were to evaluate the efficiency of analogy in the conceptual restructuring of a science topic and compare the effects of analogy in different learning conditions. Two analogical topics of physics (w...

This study is a qualitative investigation on the teaching-learning by analogy of complex curriculum concepts in natural and relevant environments, such as classrooms, to improve the ecological validity of the research itself. It aimed at exploring whether students'' successful use of analogy in learning science was related a) to the level of their...

This paper reports on a qualitative study of children's discourse-reasoning about knowledge objects emerging when the classroom becomes a community of discourse. Its purpose was to analyze metacognitive reflections with respect to the steps of the argument. Within science education classes, a part of a wider ecological curriculum was implemented by...

This qualitative study aimed at exploring whether students’ successful use of analogy in learning curriculum complex science concepts was related: (a) to the level of their understanding of a specific analogy and (b) to their metacognitive awareness of how the analogy was to be used and of the changes produced in their own conceptual structures. In...

Students are frequently exposed to and required to remember unfamiliar or incongruent information. In some cases, students choose to modify their current knowledge and beliefs about topics, and in other cases they do not. The questions of importance in this chapter are how, under what circumstances, and in what ways do individuals choose to modify...