Patricia Alexander

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• PhD
• Distinguished University Professor and Jean Mullan Professor of Literacy at University of Maryland, College Park

A design experiment was undertaken to explore the effects of science lessons, framed as persuasion, on students’ knowledge, beliefs, and interest. Sixth and seventh graders participated in lessons about Galileo and his discoveries focusing on the personal costs and public controversies surrounding those discoveries. In selected classrooms, lessons...

This study explored the domain specificity of students' beliefs about academic knowledge in three related studies. Using a four-factor model as an initial framework, a series of domain-specific items about mathematics and history was developed. In Study I, these items were administered to 182 undergraduates, and the psychometric properties and unde...

The purpose of this study was to explore the contributions of subject-matter knowledge, strategic processing, and interest to college students' educational psychology learning. The model of domain learning, or MDL (Alexander, 1997), guided our instrument development and served as the framework for multivariate analyses and path modeling. In general...

This investigation explored why and how persuasion occurs. Toward this end, we examined the processing of two articles under conditions called for in the persuasion and conceptual change literatures. One unique aspect of the current study was the use of topic-specific measures of beliefs, knowledge (i.e., perceived and demonstrated), and interest....

Individuals' beliefs about knowledge (i.e., epistemological beliefs) have become the focus of inquiry in the educational and psychological literatures. Based on an analysis of those literatures, we first propose that epistemological beliefs are multidimensional and multilayered. That is, individuals possess general beliefs about knowledge, as well...

Through our exploration of the assessment of interest, we highlight 5 issues that emerge in the effort to assess interest in content area literacy environments. First, we compare how interest is defined and generally how it has been assessed. Second, we focus more specifically on the assessment of text-based interest, and consider its assessment in...

Undergrauate participants read both a one-sided text on educational reform and a two-sided nonrefutational text on the V-Chip. Students completed topic-specific beliefs, knowledge, and interest measures and reacted to specific text characteristics. The results indicated that although both forms of text affected readers, the effects varied by the ty...

The purpose of this study was to examine the relation between children's metacognitive private speech and their mastery motivation when working on 3 age-appropriate but challenging tasks. Metacognitive private speech was defined as children's nonsocial utterances that reflected heightened awareness and regulation of their own thinking. Mastery moti...

Across eight narratives, each capturing unique characteristics of a particular after-school or out-of-school computer program, we identified several unifying themes. We offer those themes as lingering questions that merit exploration by those invested in these ‘club’ settings. Specifically, we ask about the conceptions of learning held by authors,...

The purpose of this review was twofold. First, we wanted to identify fundamental terms within the motivation literature associated with the study of academic achievement or academic development. Having identified these terms with the help of experts in the field of motivation, we wanted to document how motivation researchers defined and used these...

Transfer, the process of using knowledge or skills acquired in one context in a new or varied context, has long been the topic of spirited debate in the research community. In this chapter, fundamental dimensions that appear to underlie effective transfer are described. These fundamentals — subject-matter knowledge, general cognitive and metacognit...

In this study, we examined the learning and study strategies of 139 Singapore 9th graders enrolled in an all‐female high school for the purpose of answering three basic questions. Firstly, how do these young women's self‐reported strategy profiles compare to those of the norms for the selected strategy measure (i.e. lassi‐hs)? Secondly, how do the...

The purpose for this research was threefold: to determine whether distinct and informative student profiles would emerge from knowledge, interest, and strategy measures specific to educational psychology; to compare these profiles with prior studies; and to explore changes in student profiles across an academic semester. As a result of cluster-anal...

The authors conducted 2 studies to investigate the categorization of students' correct and incorrect responses to domain-specific analogy problems. In Study 1, participants were 6th graders who generated answers to classical analogy problems in the domain of human biology (e.g., cabin:log::skeleton:____). Study 2 focused on the analogical problem s...

In this investigation, we examined the association between young children's analogical reasoning ability and their mathematical learning. Participants were 26 four- and five-year-olds enrolled in a college-operated laboratory school in the southeastern United States. We assessed analogy reasoning by means of the Test of Analogical Reasoning in Chil...

Our goal in this article is to present a broad perspective on the state of strategy research and to consider, in brief, the prospects for strategy research in the future. We first draw on the literature in an effort to delineate the attributes of strategies and to consider several dimensions of strategies that dot the research landscape. Next, we d...

Although the desire for an education that emphasizes depth of understanding and meaningful learning has a long and distinguished history, constructivist reforms have not led to a comprehensive and coherent reform of educational practice in our schools. In fact, two previous great reforms based on constructivist principles have failed during this ce...

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the psychometric properties of the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory-High School (LASSI-HS) using a sample of high school students from Singapore. The authors first examined the reliability and validity of scores from the LASSI-HS, one of the most widely used measures of students' learning and...

The purpose of this study was twofold. First, we wanted to examine the conceptions of knowledge and beliefs of Singaporean and American students and their teachers to investigate whether differences existed across these diverse cultures. Our second purpose was to consider whether the epistemological frameworks for those individuals populating the s...

Investigates profiles of mature adult readers' who are persuaded by what they read, and what role a reader's educational level plays in the persuasion process. Finds that, for the most part, readers with moderate but favorable stances, moderate to high interest in the topic, and at least moderate levels of perceived or demonstrated knowledge were m...

Offers overviews of two eras of literacy research over the past 20 years that symbolize alternative perspectives on knowledge. Considers internal and external conditions, as well as the metaphors for and principles of knowledge that emerged. Explores rival epistemological stances that survived or thrived. Describes the seeds of a new epistemologica...

ABSTRACTS This study examined the contextual factors that influence what students deem interesting and important by examining what teachers signal as interesting and important in their classroom discussions and assessments. Participants in this investigation were three high school science teachers and their students. We created portraits of these h...

Our purpose in this study was to explore changes that occurred in college students’ knowledge, interests, and strategy use as a consequence of the formal instruction they received in a specific domain. This exploration is reported in three parts. Part I is a brief overview of the Model of Domain Learning—the framework upon which we based our predic...

Based on the work of Rosenblatt, a reader's response to text has been conceptualized as lying on a continuum from an efferent to an aesthetic stance. Those assuming an efferent stance are described as detached and passive, with a focus on taking information away from the reading event. In the aesthetic stance, by contrast, readers are focused on th...

In this commentary, we outline two responses to the question of why educational innovations come and go with such regularity. The first response we term “Doing What We Know.” This explanation relates to educators’ tendency to focus on issues that are relatively familiar, easier to communicate, and seemingly more controllable than those that are per...

In this review, text-based research on importance and interest is analyzed with several objectives in mind. First, the constructs of importance and interest are unidimensionally considered to show that various forms of each can operate within any text-learning environment. Second, research specifically addressing the interplay between these two fac...

Two experiments examined the interrelationship of subject-matter knowledge, interest, and recall in the field of human immunology/human biology and assessed cross-domain performance in the field of physics. Framed by a stage model of domain learning, cluster-analytic methods were used to group individuals on the basis of their performance on cognit...

This review of the literature had four main aims: to examine several problems associated with usage of prior knowledge terminology; to explore key dimensions of prior knowledge referenced primarily by researchers in the field of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence; to construct a conceptual map of prior knowledge terminology; and, to d...

Framed by a situation-specific and domain-specific orientation, this reaction explores two areas not directly or extensively addressed in Winne's (1995) detailing of self-regulated learning. The first focuses on the characterization of the construct of self-regulation. Specifically, it is argued that a delineation of self-regulation should consider...

In this study, we asked adults in the United States (n = 54) and Europe (n = 66), primarily the Netherlands, to share their views on the concepts of knowledge and beliefs. Among the 120 participants, there were three levels of expertise represented. Specifically, there were (a) adults seeking postsecondary degrees, (b) those completing graduate deg...

In this study, we asked adults in the United States (n = 54) and Europe (n = 66), primarily the Netherlands, to share their views on the concepts of knowledge and beliefs. Among the 120 participants, there were three levels of expertise represented. Specifically, there were (a) adults seeking postsecondary degrees, (b) those completing graduate deg...

In this study, we explored the influence of subject-matter knowledge and interest on college students' comprehension of scientific exposition. Two forms of subject-matter knowledge were considered: Passage-specific (i.e., topic) knowledge and general (i.e., domain) knowledge. College students read two passages from physics, one dealing with Stephen...

Learning from physics text is described as a complex interaction of learner, text, and context variables. As a multidimensional procedure, text processing in the domain of physics relies on readers' knowledge and interest, and on readers' ability to monitor or regulate their processing. Certain textual features intended to assist readers in underst...

This research examined the influence of subject-matter knowledge on students' recall of and interest in scientific exposition. Two forms of subject-matter knowledge were assessed: topic knowledge (i.e., specific subject-matter knowledge referenced in text) and domain knowledge (i.e., knowledge pertinent to a particular field of study). Two hundred...

Determined the creative problem solving of 100 children in Head Start programs, kindergarten, and Grades 1 and 2 by examining their responses to realistic and fanciful stories posing similar problems. Ss listened individually to 1 realistic story and 1 fanciful story in which the main characters were trapped and needed to be rescued. Ss completed t...

Sixty-six studies were reviewed that met several a priori criteria. Specifically, the studies had to be empirical investigations that related to a particular academic domain and that involved connected discourse presented either in traditional written form or on computer. In addition, the studies had to incorporate some measure of both knowledge an...

Sixty-six studies were reviewed that met several a priori criteria. Specifically, the studies had to be empirical investigations that related to a particular academic domain and that involved connected discourse presented either in traditional written form or on computer. In addition, the studies had to incorporate some measure of both knowledge an...

Two studies were conducted to investigate the nature of teacher questioning and its relationship to what learners consider important to remember when processing exposition. Specifically, we wanted to determine if teachers who are asked to write questions over an expository passage focus those questions on segments of text that have been determined...

consider how cognitive theory and psychometrics have been brought together to assist in unraveling the diagnostic data in students' incorrect responses / discuss how cognitive researchers have analyzed errors to understand procedural "bugs" or "mis"-conceptions . . . and how psychometricians have used information about wrong answers to improve the...

Between 1990 and 1996, an impressive collection of educational researchers contributed their wisdom and years of well-honed insights to a set of 14 psychological principles that they hoped would guide the redesign and reform of American schools [e.g., American Psychological Association (APA) Presidential Task Force on Psychology in Education and Mi...

Research in domain knowledge has progressed to the point where it should undergo further examination. As a basis for that reexamination, the nature of domain knowledge and its relationship to other knowledge forms are considered. The status of research on expert-novice differences, on the relationship between domain and strategic knowledge, and on...

Comprehension is the successful outcome of reading. It results from a learner-regulated interaction of information stored in memory and information presented in text. Children often fail to comprehend text for reasons that have little to do with comprehension proficiency. Some of those reasons are—(1) decoding deficiencies, (2) confusion about task...

Dewey (1913) suggested some time ago that trying to find out what is of interest to students is an important part of schooling; on the other hand, “making things interesting” is artificial and often unsuccessful. Two studies investigating the placement of interesting detail in a text about a physicist and his scientific work are reported here. In b...

Terms used to designate knowledge constructs have proliferated in the literature and often seem to duplicate, subsume, or contradict one another. In this article, we present a conceptual framework for organizing and relating terms that pertain to select knowledge constructs. We begin with an examination of the literature. Based on that review, we b...

In this investigation, we analyzed the role domain knowledge, analogic reasoning ability, and interactive knowledge play in the comprehension of scientific exposition. Data from three experiments involving sixth graders, high-school students, and college undergraduates are examined via regression and discriminant analysis procedures. The dependent...

A suitable correlation can be made to represent the simulated distillation of heavy oils starting from thennoaravimetric measurements. This method is applicable to hydrocarbons having an initial boiling point equal or greater than 200°C.The simulated thermogravimetric distillation fit was obtained from experiments with the standard compounds obtain...

We investigated the effects of domain-specific and strategic knowledge on analogy performance for 128 gifted and nongifted sixth grade and high-school students. A cognitive battery consisted of a figural analogy measure, a human biology multiple-choice test, and a human biology analogy task. On the basis of these tasks, we determined that males and...

In this article, the authors describe the results of three experiments designed to examine the effect training has on students' domain-specific and strategic knowledge. Three groups of sixth graders participated in Experiment I. Subjects were low in competence in either human biological knowledge, or analogical reasoning, or both. In Experiment II,...

This article summarizes "facts" emerging from recent research and explanations of those facts arising from metacognitive theory. We suggest that the following four questions should be addressed empirically: (a) How can we measure "knowing about knowing" more accurately?, (b) How can we measure the effects of strategy instruction?, (c) What are the...

This study assessed the development of analogical reasoning of 4- and 5-year-olds. Subjects were 60 preschoolers, ages 48 months to 71 months. Performance of geometric analogy problems was measured at monthly intervals with the Test of Analogical Reasoning in Children. Results indicated that the children were generally stable in their reasoning per...

This chapter discusses the implicit instruction of strategies for learning from text. As effective as special learning strategy courses can be, their impact is limited by two factors. The first is that they reach a growing but, nevertheless, still small proportion of college students. Thus, most students never make contact with a special curriculum...

This paper presents the results of an extensive review of the literature that relates to the interaction of domain-specific and strategic knowledge on academic performance. Our objectives in this review were to: (a) provide a critical analysis of that literature, (b) present hypotheses about the interaction between domain-specific and strategic kno...

The authors examined the effects of two instructional approaches, combined with peer tutoring, on gifted and nongifted sixth-grade students' performance of a verbal analogy and a comprehension task. Subjects were 194 students in nine intact language arts classes; classes were randomly assigned to two treatment conditions and a control condition. St...

Prompted by the lack of research on learning in large college classes in terms of the cognitive processes and strategies students use, an experimental, preliminary study implemented generative activities in an undergraduate educational psychology class of approximately 70 students. The activities involved such things as stopping in the middle of a...

In Study 1, 25 4th-grade teachers were assigned to control, Level 1, or Level 2 treatment conditions. The Level 1 condition involved the receipt of detailed analogy lessons; the Level 2 condition encompassed both the receipt of instructional materials and explicit training for teachers in their underlying theory and use. Results indicate that stude...

Assessed the performance of 4- and 5-year-olds on geometric analogy tasks. Each task consisted of 16 analogy problems that were presented in a manipulative, gamelike context and that used attribute blocks that varied on the dimensions of color, size, and shape. Experiment 1 demonstrated that many of the preschoolers were capable of applying analogi...

Two experiments involving a componential approach to analogy training were conducted. The analogy training was organized in two phases: a short-term intensive phase, and an extended period of intermittent instruction. In Experiment 1, direct effects of analogy training and the far transfer to inferential comprehension were assessed for fourth grade...

Given that college students do much of their learning by studying from textbooks, we were interested in the guidance they receive in their interactions with print. Having previously reported on the influence of course instructors on the student‐textbook interaction, here we examined the nature and prevalence of author‐provided cues to effective pro...

The differential effects of two different types of problem-solving training on the problem-solving abilities of gifted fourth graders were studied. Two successive classes of gifted fourth graders from Weslaco Independent School District (Texas) were pretested with the Coloured Progressive Matrices (CPM) and Thinking Creatively With Pictures Figural...

Examined children's knowledge of 3 structural properties of expository text—topical relatedness, superordination, and cohesion. 15 children each in Grades 3, 5, and 7 completed a series of paragraph-construction tasks. Nearly all the Ss were able to identify paragraphs in text and to group topically related sentences together to make short texts. O...

This investigation examined the effects of training on four-year-olds' ability to solve geometric analogy problems. Twenty children participated in three consecutive training sessions that were based on component processes underlying analogical reasoning. Trained participants consistently outperformed non-trained participants on the geometric analo...

This investigation examined the effects of specific task‐related information on undergraduates’ studying behaviors and question‐answering performance. Forty students studied and were tested on a 4000‐word article about farming in Ireland. The results of the study demonstrated that specific postreading response criteria significantly improved the qu...

This study was undertaken to determine teachers’ perceptions of the helpfulness of basal reading manuals and to systematically examine teachers actual use of these manuals. Thirty‐eight teachers in grades 1‐5 responded to a questionnaire asking them to rate how helpful each part of the basal manual was in presenting a reading lesson. In addition, t...