Patricia Alexander

University of Maryland, College Park | UMD, UMCP, University of Maryland College Park · Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology

This special issue was motivated by the realization that student motivation is inherently complex and no single framework can capture it in its full richness. How- ever, the current zeitgeist in educational psychology seems to explicitly discourage attempts at integration as researchers are incentivized to stay within their own theoretical camps. I...

Writing argumentative essays, particularly when using information from multiple sources of varying credibility, poses a significant challenge for students. Despite previous research acknowledging this difficulty, the specific dynamics of the argumentative essay writing process and where breakdowns occur remain unclear. In this study, we modeled the...

In this commentary, I explore the contributions of the articles in this special issue from the vantage point of a theorist, researcher, and educator invested in student learning and academic development. First, I consider how these writings differentiate on the basis of the means authors applied to achieve the special issue goal of dismantling theo...

In 2006, after receiving the Division 15 Career Award, Alexander delivered a keynote address entitled “Evolution of a Learning Theory: A Case Study.” This presentation was a clarion call for greater respect for and attention to scientific speculation in educational psychology as a critical component in theory building. To build her case, Alexander...

Creative thinking is a process through which individuals generate ideas that are simultaneously novel and meaningful within a given social context. Historically, psychologists have closely studied the general creative capacity of young learners, as well as the domain-specific creativity of experts. However, the developmental trajectory from childre...

We conducted a systematic review of classroom-based academic writing interventions in higher education. Several interesting trends regarding interest in academic writing, instructional features used in the intervention, and conditions under which these interventions are effective occurred and are discussed on the poster. Please contact us if you wo...

The goals of this article are three-pronged. The first is to consider the perspectives and insights collectively offered by the four contributions to this special issue dealing with higher-order, critical, and critical-analytic thinking. The second is to build on the content of those contributions and on the literature from philosophy and education...

What role does knowledge play in expertise development in professional domains, and to what extent does that domain-specific knowledge interact with individuals’ strategic abilities and their deep-seated interest in a profession? These are central questions explored in this chapter that positions expertise and its development within the framework o...

In this article, we share what we learned about undergraduates' struggles in writing quality summaries, comparison texts, and argumentative essays that were components of a unique course, Learning How to Learn. This course was designed to address core psychological issues that impede optimal learning for students from all majors, many of whom are p...

Motivation science has advanced tremendously in the past decade. However, it is now clear that future progress is going to be stalled by the extent of disagreement among motivation scientists to some basic, yet controversial, questions. To help move motivation science toward greater coherence, the editors recruited prominent scholars to debate thei...

Motivation science has advanced tremendously in the past decade. However, it is now clear that future progress is going to be stalled by the extent of disagreement among motivation scientists to some basic, yet controversial, questions. To help move motivation science toward greater coherence, the editors recruited prominent scholars to debate thei...

Motivation science has advanced tremendously in the past decade. However, it is now clear that future progress is going to be stalled by the extent of disagreement among motivation scientists to some basic, yet controversial, questions. To help move motivation science toward greater coherence, the editors recruited prominent scholars to debate thei...

In this article, we share what we learned about undergraduates’ struggles in writing quality summaries, comparison texts, and argumentative essays that were components of a unique course, Learning How to Learn. This course was designed to address core psychological issues that impede optimal learning for students from all majors, many of whom are p...

This systematic literature review examined the research on prior knowledge and its activation to ascertain how these terms are defined, what specific techniques have been empirically investigated, and the conditions under which prior knowledge activation facilitated students’ comprehension. Fifty-four articles met the inclusion criteria and reveale...

This systematic literature review examined the research on prior knowledge and its activation to ascertain how these terms are defined; what specific techniques have been empirically investigated; and the conditions under which prior knowledge activation facilitated students’ comprehension. Fifty-four articles met the inclusion criteria and reveale...

The goal of this article is to establish a framework for learning across the lifespan. We first overview principles of learning that serve as common ground for the diverse theories populating the literature. Next, we consider competing views on the relation between learning and development. What follows is a comparison of the literatures on learnin...

Objective The advantages and popularity of technology among learners have vaulted it to the forefront of medical education. The current state of learning and teaching intertwined with technology in medical education and residency is described. Following these characterizations, consideration is given to changes worth exploring in the habits of mind...

This study aimed to explore undergraduates’ perceptions of relevance in conjunction with two associated constructs, personal interest, and task value. To unearth these perceptions, American (n = 104) and Dutch (n = 79) students completed the Conceptualization of Relevance Task (CoRT). This task required them to: (a) select a graphic that best repre...

This paper describes the benefits of a psychometric analytic approach when studying students’ ability to comprehend texts. A reading comprehension measure consisting of four text passages with 32 questions was developed, and analyses using a mean-based approach and linear logistic test (LLTM) method were performed. According to ANOVA, eighth-grade...

The comprehension and calibration of 54 undergraduates were investigated as they read excerpts from an introductory geology textbook on weather and soil in print and digitally. All excerpts were approximately 1600 words in length and contained a graph, a diagram, and three photographs that complemented or extended the written text. Each student rea...

The purpose of this review was to examine the effects that audiobook listening and print reading have on comprehension performance and the role that learner characteristics, text features, and contextual factors play in reported outcomes. The review, which included 32 documents, covered elementary, secondary, and college students who processed narr...

The goal of this article is to demonstrate the value of incorporating relational reasoning assessment and training in tertiary education. To accomplish this, the authors organize the article into three sections. The first section overviews the nature of relational reasoning, and its different forms, developmental trajectories, and assessment. How r...

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the relational reasoning performance of three groups from South Korea who either differed significantly in age or in the timing of their education. One group consisted of 200 sixth-grade adolescents. The other groups were composed of older adults who either attended school during the mandated timefra...

This study investigated whether unsuccessful transfer of critical thinking (CT) would be due to recognition, recall, or application problems (cf. three-step model of transfer). In two experiments (laboratory: N = 196; classroom: N = 104), students received a CT-skills pretest (including learning, near transfer, and far transfer items), CT-instructi...

Relational reasoning is a higher-order executive function that involves the ability to perceive meaningful patterns within a body of seemingly unrelated information. In this study, the ability of 749 fourth (Mage = 10), sixth (Mage = 12), eighth (Mage = 14), and tenth graders (Mage = 16) to identify meaningful relational patterns was investigated....

Metacognition, or the ability to think about thinking, plays a significant role in the performance of first-year design students. Although the number of studies that focus on metacognition has increased in the past decade, additional studies are needed to more fully investigate metacognition and the use of metacognitive strategies in design educati...

For several decades, there has been a push to advance students’ knowledge and abilities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). One capacity that has been linked positively to STEM achievement is relational reasoning, which involves identifying associations between objects, ideas, and situations. Yet, few studies have examined...

This study examined undergraduates’ strategy use when learning about a complex and controversial topic (i.e., mass incarceration in the United States) based on information presented across multiple texts. Guided by the Integrated Framework of Learning from Multiple Texts, this study directed students to engage in one of three forms of strategy use...

In this study, we analyzed the imprecise (i.e., less mathematically precise) responses that 148 third- to fifth-grade Chinese students made on selected-response problems that were part of a spontaneous mathematical focusing task, the Quantitative Relations Test for Chinese Children (QRTC²). The purpose for this analysis was to ascertain whether the...

Results of numerous studies indicate that metacognition plays a significant role in students’ design education. Despite the growing number of studies on the role of metacognition, the nature of metacognitive processing in design education and how metacognitive strategies contribute to students’ design are not well understood. Thus, the main purpose...

The purpose of this article is to look anew at the concepts of reading, reading development, and reading research as they exist beyond the boundaries of the “science of reading” controversy. The context for this reconceptualization is reading in the digital age and the challenges that today’s readers confront daily. Those challenges include informa...

Abstract: The purpose of the current mixed-methods study was to investigate the effectiveness of a traditional and novel knowledge activation technique for supporting fifth and sixth graders’ comprehension of exposition covering unfamiliar content. For the quantitative portion, 149 rural middle-school students were randomly assigned to one of three...

The overarching goal of this 2-phase study was to investigate the contributions of relational reasoning to mathematical thinking and performance for 790 primary and middle-school Chinese students. Phase I of the study was undertaken to establish the reliability and validity of the Test of Relational Reasoning-Junior (TORRjr), a 32-item measure deve...

The purpose of the current study was to: (a) examine the frequency of prior knowledge (PK) activation in elementary classrooms while students were engaged with text, (b) investigate the relevance of students’ responses to teacher prompts, (c) explore the nature of teachers’ and students’ prior knowledge activation utterances, and (d) investigate wh...

The purpose of this chapter is to establish the foundational role of relational reasoning in the quality integration of multiple representations, documents, and perspectives. To achieve that purpose, we first explicate the nature and forms of relational reasoning (i.e., the discernment of meaningful patterns in any stream of information). Then we c...

The purpose of this article is to overview various challenges that prospective authors of quality systematic reviews should be prepared to address. These challenges pertain to all phases of the review process: from posing a critical question worthy of pursuit and executing a search procedure that is appropriately framed and transparently recorded,...

Handbook of Strategies and Strategic Processing provides a state-of-the-art synthesis of conceptual, measurement, and analytical issues regarding learning strategies and strategic processing. Contributions by educational psychology experts present the clearest-yet definition of this essential and quickly evolving component of numerous theoretical f...

In truth, it feels rather pretentious of me to consider my life to be a meaningful source of wisdom that might guide future scholars. Perhaps that is why I have chosen to draw on the life of my father, William Cecil Mullins, as the inspiration for the guidance I proffer here. I rarely speak about this good man and only few of my friends and colleag...

My purpose in this commentary was to seek out any common ground that might be found for theory and research on curiosity and interest as detailed by the contributors to this special issue. Despite the numerous differences that these authors demarcated, several areas of concurrence were readily identified. Those seven areas are, thus, specified and...

Prior work has examined the role of interest in students’ single text processing and comprehension, but interest has been under-examined within the context of multiple text use. This study examines two forms of interest, individual interest and situational interest, in the context of students’ completion of a multiple text task. Time on texts and t...

Background The term individual differences refers to the physical, behavioral, cognitive, social, and emotional attributes that make each human unique. Late adolescence to young adulthood represents a time of significant neurobiological and cognitive transformations that contribute further to human variability. Those transformations include an incr...

In this commentary, the two critical attributes of seductive details are described through a historical lens: relevance and interest. For each of these attributes, various forms that have populated the seductive detail literature are distinguished, and the specific manner in which each is interpreted by contributors to the Special Issue is consider...

We introduce the Integrated Framework of Multiple Texts to understand how students use and form connections between multiple texts to accomplish personal or task goals. The Integrated Framework of Multiple Texts conceptualizes students’ multiple text use as unfolding over the course of three stages—preparation, execution, and production. In the pre...

Academic tasks frequently require students to effectively process multiple sources across print and digital mediums. Yet, studies of multiple source use have almost exclusively confined examinations to a single medium. In the present study, undergraduate students (n = 50) wore a head-mounted video camera while developing a PowerPoint presentation b...

In this commentary, several core principles underlying the editorial and articles comprising the Special Issue on improving literacy engagement are identified and discussed. Those principles pertain to the multidimensional nature of literacy engagement, the explicit or implicit definitions offered for the construct, the positive contributions that...

Scaffolding has been shown to facilitate students’ text comprehension and task performance. Yet less is known about the necessity of scaffolding for competent students reading unfamiliar content. To explore that question, we investigated the effects of two knowledge scaffolding techniques (i.e., mobilization and concept mapping) versus control on u...

Real-time processing behaviors and processing time for 57 undergraduates reading information texts in print and digitally were used to identify distinct performance profiles. Students underlined the printed text as they read and followed along with their cursor when reading digitally. Immediately after reading, students answered three comprehension...

This article offers a retrospective and prospective analysis of the role of cognitive strategies in students’ academic development over the past 25 years. The focus is on those processes that individuals employ to advance their own learning and understanding (learning strategies) and, to a lesser degree, those procedures applied to regulate and mon...

In this conclusion to the Special Issue, features of multiple documents and multi-modal documents are systematized. Specifically, documents are defined according to their (a) intended message, (b) author and purpose for being created, (c) symbol system(s) used, and (d) related nature. Indeed, documents are conceptualized as presenting complementary...

The test of relational reasoning (TORR) is designed to assess the ability to identify complex patterns within visuospatial stimuli. The TORR is designed for use in school and university settings, and therefore, its measurement invariance across diverse groups is critical. In this investigation, a large sample, representative of a major university o...

Purpose: The primary goal of this commentary was to consider the future directions that researchers dealing with levels and regulation of strategies and with approaches to learning may wish to pursue in the years to come. Procedure: In order to accomplish this goal, the first step was to look for any common ground shared by authors contributing...

Students were asked to report their typical practices with regard to source evaluation using the Credibility Assessment Scale (CAS). Students’ reports were validated against behavioural and cognitive indicators of source evaluation. Specifically, while researching a social science prompt, students’ source use behaviours, related to text evaluation,...

In this commentary, an attempt was made to uncover common ground about relevance found among the contributions to this special issue, which reflect diverse theoretical orientations and empirical traditions. Those commonalities characterize relevance as person-centered, complex or multifaceted, significant, and modifiable. With these commonalities i...

An earlier version of this paper contained incorrect tables due to a publication error. Tables have now been corrected.

This study explored the effects of processing texts in print or digitally on readers' comprehension, processing time, and calibration. Eighty-six undergraduates read print and digital versions of book excerpts about childhood ailments presented in counterbalanced order. Comprehension was tested at three levels (i.e., main idea, key points, and othe...

Beliefs about knowledge have been found to relate to a variety of student outcomes and to vary across educational domains and instructional contexts. However, there are limited data on students’ beliefs about information and truth, vis-à-vis knowledge (i.e., epistemic beliefs) and how these beliefs differ across instructional settings. Undergraduat...

Esta parte del monográfico presenta los comentarios de varios especialistas internacionales sobre las contribuciones de Paul R. Pintrich a la investigación sobre Psicología y Educación. Lucia Mason (Universidad de Padua, Italia) comenta las aportaciones del trabajo del profesor Pintrich y sus colaboradores sobre las creencias epistemológicas y su p...

In this commentary, theoretical principles pertaining to the role of epistemic cognition in teaching and professional development, synthesized from the content of this special issue on reflection and reflexivity, are proffered. These theoretical notions are then followed with a critical analysis of specific challenges encountered in enacting these...

This systematic literature review was undertaken primarily to examine the role that print and digitally mediums play in text comprehension. Overall, results suggest that medium plays an influential role under certain text or task conditions or for certain readers. Additional goals were to identify how researchers defined and measured comprehension,...

We introduce a special issue featuring four theoretical models of multiple text comprehension. We present a central framework for conceptualizing the four models in this special issue. Specifically, we chart the models according to how they consider learner, texts, task, and context factors in explaining multiple text comprehension. In addition, th...

This article introduces the cognitive affective engagement model (CAEM) of multiple source use. The CAEM is presented as a way of unifying cognitive and behaviorally focused models of multiple text engagement with research on the role of affective factors (e.g., interest) in text processing. The CAEM proposes that students' engagement with multiple...

On the occasion of the 125th anniversary of the American Psychological Association, the legacies and progenies of the discipline of educational psychology are explored. To capture those legacies, transformational and influential contributions by educational psychologists to schools and society are described as key themes. Those themes entail: the “...

What is relational reasoning? Why is it critical to consider the role of relational reasoning in students learning and development in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)? Moreover, how do the particular contributions populating this special issue address the pressing societal needs and offer guidance to researchers and practiti...

This article offers an overview of the nature and role of relational thinking and relational reasoning in human learning and performance, both of which pertain to the discernment of meaningful patterns within any informational stream. Distinctions between thinking and reasoning relationally are summarized, along with specific forms of patterning th...

Three indicators of undergraduate students' (n = 197) source evaluation were investigated as students completed an academic task requiring the use of multiple texts. The source evaluation metrics examined were students' (1) accessing of document information, (2) trustworthiness ratings, and (3) citation in written responses. All three indicators of...

This study examines the moderating effects of a situational factor (i.e., text type) and an individual factor (i.e., subject-matter knowledge) on the relation between depth of processing and performance. One-hundred and fifty-one undergraduates completed measures of subject-matter knowledge, read either an expository or persuasive text about the ex...

This study explored differences that might exist in comprehension when students read digital and print texts. Ninety undergraduates read both digital and print versions of newspaper articles and book excerpts on topics of childhood ailments. Prior to reading texts in counterbalanced order, topic knowledge was assessed and students were asked to sta...

Executive function is comprised of different behavioral and cognitive elements and is considered to play a significant role in learning and academic achievement. Educational researchers frequently study the construct. However, because of its complexity functionally, the research on executive function can at times be both confusing and contradictory...

The volume is the 100th anniversary edition of Review of Educational Research. It is freely accessible at http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/rrea/current

This study investigated the relational reasoning capabilities of older adolescents and young adults when the focal assessment was a verbal and more schooled measure than 1 that was figural and more novel in its configuration. To achieve this end, the verbal test of relational reasoning (vTORR) was constructed to parallel the test of relational reas...

The ability to discern meaningful patterns—relational reasoning—has been identified as a process important for student learning and cognition. Yet, research has typically investigated performance over processing, particularly when examining the role of factors such as working memory capacity. Moreover, studies have focused on analogical reasoning t...

Relational reasoning, or the ability to discern meaningful patterns within a stream of information, is a critical cognitive ability associated with academic and professional success. Importantly, relational reasoning has been described as taking multiple forms, depending on the type of higher order relations being drawn between and among concepts....

This article addresses two goals. First, it considers the nature and importance of relational reasoning, the ability to discern meaningful patterns within informational streams. Second, it examines four principles about relational reasoning derived from the empirical literature. Specifically, we argue that relational reasoning is foundational and p...