Learning from and building on the accomplishments of scholarly publications is often difficult. To address thischallenge, this work leverages well-replicated cognitive science phenomena to promote people’s understanding of researchfound in journal articles. It forms the conceptual groundwork for a digital platform through which users can author and learnfrom interactive multimedia documents that communicate research more effectively. One of the many recommendations is toreduce the split-attention effect by integrating text and graphics in figures. Doing so may help readers understand complexvisuospatial representations. Encouraging active processing via comprehension questions and responsive simulations of ex-perimental procedures embedded in articles may boost learning even more. To promote the creative extension of research,evidence-based brainstorming prompts that trigger analogical reasoning and episodic specificity induction should be adopted.If scholarly communication is centered on scientific principles like these, then the dissemination and dynamics of science mayboth advance.

Mathematical cognition researchers have studied the mental representations of natural numbers, integers, and frac-tions extensively. We investigated the representations of irrational and perfect square numbers in a laboratory setting. Eightyparticipants performed (1) a magnitude comparison task (MC) by indicating which of two numbers is greater or lesser, (2) anumber line estimation task (NLE) that required subjects to estimate the positions of natural and radical numbers on a numberline, and (3) a numeracy test. On the MC task, participants were slower for radical expressions than for natural numbers andshowed distance and size effects for both. When comparing radical expressions, they were faster when both numbers wereperfect squares. This suggests a privileged mental representation for perfect squares. On the NLE task, participants wereless accurate when locating radical expressions. Performance on the numeracy test revealed broad deficits in conceptual andprocedural knowledge of irrational numbers.

Peer-reviewed scholarly documents like empirical journal articles are the vehicles through which scientific discoveries arecommunicated, critiqued, and applied to practical contexts. Whether these papers are published in print journals or hostedon websites, readers experience significant learning barriers. Consider, for instance, the difficulty of reading experimentalmethodologies. Articles usually describe complex methods using static text and images. This approach limits learningon an individual level and collective scientific progress. Here, I explored whether interactive simulations of experimentaltasks interleaved with text may better convey methodological information in a psychological journal article. In a laboratoryexperiment, novice undergraduate students studied an article composed of (1) text and images, (2) text and videos, or (3)text and interactive simulations of experimental tasks. Posttest scores and responses to a questionnaire favored interactivesimulations. Results are interpreted using multiple learning theories.

A study, investigating the relationship between scientific reasoning and the capacity to discover the strategy to playan hypothetico-deductive game (MasterMind), posits that students being able to discover Complex Strategies (vs. GeneralStrategy, Feedback Related, No Strategy) were also, on average, performing higher on our measure of scientific reasoning,itself composed of evaluative, experimental and scientific knowledge measures. In addition to bridge the discovery of complexstrategies with higher SR ability, the finding also suggests the necessity to integrate rule discovery exercises in curriculum to 1-practice while 2- recognize valid reasoning procedures. Finally, inquiring about the middle schooler’s capacity to recognize themost effective strategy, will help to assess the class level as a whole. Such assessment will help the teacher identify some needsand target effective lessons to explain and facilitate the transfer of CoV strategies to novel situations, as suggested by “real life”problem demands.

In STEM domains, students are expected to acquire domainknowledge from visual representations that they may not yetbe able to interpret. Such learning requires perceptual flu-ency, or the ability to intuitively and rapidly see the underlyingconcepts in visuals and to translate between them. Perceptualfluency is acquired via nonverbal, implicit learning processes.Thus far, we have lacked a principled approach for identify-ing a sequence of perceptual fluency problems that promoterobust learning. Here, we describe how a novel machine learn-ing technique can generate an optimal sequence of perceptualfluency problems. In a human experiment, we show that amachine-generated sequence outperforms both a random se-quence and a sequence generated by a human domain expert.Interestingly, the machine-generated sequence resulted in sig-nificantly lower accuracy during training, but higher posttestaccuracy. This suggests that the machine-generated sequenceinduced desirable difficulties. To our knowledge, our study isthe first to show that machine learning can yield desirable dif-ficulties for perceptual learning

Executive function is a fundamental component of the human cognitive architecture. Here, we investigate the rela-tionship between executive function and scientific reasoning. Eighth graders completed measures of three executive functions(EFs): shifting, inhibiting, and updating. They also completed a measure of cognitive flexibility, the Wisconsin Card Sort Task(WCST), that has predicted scientific reasoning in prior studies. Scientific reasoning was measured by a standardized test ofscience achievement. A principal components analysis found that the three EFs were separable. Different EFs predicted dif-ferent aspects of cognitive flexibility; notably, participants with poor shifting ability made more perseverative errors. Both EFand WCST predicted science achievement. Of note was the finding that better updating (i.e., working memory) was associatedwith higher science scores. These findings illuminate the role of EF in cognitive flexibility and scientific reasoning, and pointthe way to future studies of the effect of training EF on science achievement.