Predicting as a learning strategy.

This article attempts to delineate the procedural and mechanistic characteristics of predicting as a learning strategy. While asking students to generate a prediction before presenting the correct answer has long been a popular learning strategy, the exact mechanisms by which it improves learning are only beginning to be unraveled. Moreover, predicting shares many features with other retrieval-based learning strategies (e.

Psychological structure and neuroendocrine patterns of daily stress appraisals.

Threat and challenge are two fundamental appraisal concepts of psychological stress theories, determined by the mismatch between demands and resources. Previous research has predominantly investigated the neuroendocrine correlates of stress appraisal in laboratory contexts during acute demanding situations. We tested whether the psychoneuroendocrinology of stress appraisals can also be investigated in naturalistic trans-contextual everyday life settings.

Examining the relevance of basic numerical skills for mathematical achievement in secondary school using a within-task assessment approach.

Previous research repeatedly found basic numerical abilities (e.g., magnitude understanding, arithmetic fact knowledge, etc.

Biological and environmental factors as sources of variation in nocturnal behavior of giraffe.

Upon a drastic decline of the giraffe population in the wild, conservation efforts and therefore the role of zoos have become more important than ever. With their unique opportunities, zoos provide excellent conditions to study animal behavior, expanding the knowledge about the giraffe's behavior repertoire and their ability to adapt. This study therefore examined the nocturnal behavior of 63 giraffe living in 13 different EAZA zoos across Germany and the Netherlands.

Stressor anticipation and subsequent affective well-being: A link potentially explained by perseverative cognitions.

Anticipatory stress can prospectively and negatively influence diverse outcomes, including cognitive performance and emotional well-being. It has been suggested that perseverative cognitions (e.g.

Why do my thoughts feel so bad? Getting at the reciprocal effects of rumination and negative affect using dynamic structural equation modeling.

Rumination means to perseveratively think about one's negative feelings and problems. It is a response to affective distress that is often referred to as maladaptive emotion regulation. According to the response styles theory and control theory, rumination may further prolong and exacerbate affective distress.

How Do Art Skills Influence Visual Search? - Eye Movements Analyzed With Hidden Markov Models.

The results of two experiments are analyzed to find out how artistic expertise influences visual search. Experiment I comprised survey data of 1,065 students on self-reported visual memory skills and their ability to find three targets in four images of artwork. Experiment II comprised eye movement data of 50 Visual Literacy (VL) experts and non-experts whose eye movements during visual search were analyzed for nine images of artwork as an external validation of the assessment tasks performed in Sample I.

A Little Autonomy Support Goes a Long Way: Daily Autonomy-Supportive Parenting, Child Well-Being, Parental Need Fulfillment, and Change in Child, Family, and Parent Adjustment Across the Adaptation to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

This study examined the effects of daily parental autonomy support on changes in child behavior, family environment, and parental well-being across 3 weeks during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. Day-to-day associations among autonomy-supportive parenting, parental need fulfillment, and child well-being were also assessed. Parents (longitudinal N = 469; M  = 42.

Which Data Do Elementary School Teachers Use to Determine Reading Difficulties in Their Students?

Small-group interventions allow for tailored instruction for students with learning difficulties. A crucial first step is the accurate identification of students who need such an intervention. This study investigated how teachers decide whether their students need a remedial reading intervention.

Evaluation of Online Information in University Students: Development and Scaling of the Screening Instrument EVON.

As Internet sources provide information of varying quality, it is an indispensable prerequisite skill to evaluate the relevance and credibility of online information. Based on the assumption that competent individuals can use different properties of information to assess its relevance and credibility, we developed the EVON (evaluation of online information), an interactive computer-based test for university students. The developed instrument consists of eight items that assess the skill to evaluate online information in six languages.

A semiparametric approach for item response function estimation to detect item misfit.

When scaling data using item response theory, valid statements based on the measurement model are only permissible if the model fits the data. Most item fit statistics used to assess the fit between observed item responses and the item responses predicted by the measurement model show significant weaknesses, such as the dependence of fit statistics on sample size and number of items. In order to assess the size of misfit and to thus use the fit statistic as an effect size, dependencies on properties of the data set are undesirable.

Epistemic Network Analyses of Economics Students' Graph Understanding: An Eye-Tracking Study.

Learning to solve graph tasks is one of the key prerequisites of acquiring domain-specific knowledge in most study domains. Analyses of graph understanding often use eye-tracking and focus on analyzing how much time students spend gazing at particular areas of a graph-Areas of Interest (AOIs). To gain a deeper insight into students' task-solving process, we argue that the gaze shifts between students' fixations on different AOIs (so-termed transitions) also need to be included in holistic analyses of graph understanding that consider the importance of transitions for the task-solving process.

Digital phenotyping: towards replicable findings with comprehensive assessments and integrative models in bipolar disorders.

Background: Digital phenotyping promises to unobtrusively obtaining a continuous and objective input of symptomatology from patients' daily lives. The prime example are bipolar disorders, as smartphone parameters directly reflect bipolar symptomatology. Empirical studies, however, have yielded inconsistent findings.

More Than (Single) Text Comprehension? - On University Students' Understanding of Multiple Documents.

The digital revolution has made a multitude of text documents from highly diverse perspectives on almost any topic easily available. Accordingly, the ability to integrate and evaluate information from different sources, known as multiple document comprehension, has become increasingly important. Because multiple document comprehension requires the integration of content and source information across texts, it is assumed to exceed the demands of single text comprehension due to the inclusion of two additional mental representations: the integrated situation model and the intertext model.

Change in mental health symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic: The role of appraisals and daily life experiences.

Objective: When confronted with major threats, people often experience decline in well-being. The central purpose of this study was to identify mechanisms underlying change of well-being in times of threat, using the example of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on appraisals of the pandemic and affective states, stress, as well as mindfulness in daily life.

Method: We conducted a study across 3.

Ambulatory Assessment for Physical Activity Research: State of the Science, Best Practices and Future Directions.

Technological and digital progress benefits physical activity (PA) research. Here we compiled expert knowledge on how Ambulatory Assessment (AA) is utilized to advance PA research, i.e.

Highs and lows: Genetic susceptibility to daily events.

Why people differ in their susceptibility to external events is essential to our understanding of personality, human development, and mental disorders. Genes explain a substantial portion of these differences. Specifically, genes influencing the serotonin system are hypothesized to be differential susceptibility factors, determining a person's reactivity to both positive and negative environments.

Cognitive Prerequisites for Generative Learning: Why Some Learning Strategies Are More Effective Than Others.

This study examined age-related differences in the effectiveness of two generative learning strategies (GLSs). Twenty-five children aged 9-11 and 25 university students aged 17-29 performed a facts learning task in which they had to generate either a prediction or an example before seeing the correct result. We found a significant Age × Learning Strategy interaction, with children remembering more facts after generating predictions rather than examples, whereas both strategies were similarly effective in adults.

Within-person structures of daily cognitive performance differ from between-person structures of cognitive abilities.

Over a century of research on between-person differences has resulted in the consensus that human cognitive abilities are hierarchically organized, with a general factor, termed general intelligence or "," uppermost. Surprisingly, it is unknown whether this body of evidence is informative about how cognition is structured within individuals. Using data from 101 young adults performing nine cognitive tasks on 100 occasions distributed over six months, we find that the structures of individuals' cognitive abilities vary among each other, and deviate greatly from the modal between-person structure.

Reanalysis of the German PISA Data: A Comparison of Different Approaches for Trend Estimation With a Particular Emphasis on Mode Effects.

International large-scale assessments, such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), are conducted to provide information on the effectiveness of education systems. In PISA, the target population of 15-year-old students is assessed every 3 years. Trends show whether competencies have changed in the countries between PISA cycles.

Studying Within-Person Variation and Within-Person Couplings in Intensive Longitudinal Data: Lessons Learned and to Be Learned.

Intensive longitudinal designs (e.g., experience sampling methods, daily diary studies, or ambulatory assessments) continue to gain importance in psychological aging research.

The bright and the dark side of peer relationships: Differential effects of relatedness satisfaction and frustration at school on affective well-being in children's daily lives.

Satisfaction and frustration of the basic psychological need for relatedness have been postulated to play a vital role for affective well-being. Yet, this prediction has not been thoroughly tested in schoolchildren's everyday lives. In this work, we examined the association between relatedness satisfaction and frustration at school on daily and average positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) using ambulatory assessment in three intensive longitudinal studies with children aged 9-12 (total = 317).

Hierarchical Development of Early Visual-Spatial Abilities - A Taxonomy Based Assessment Using the MaGrid App.

Visual-spatial abilities (VSA) are considered a building block of early numerical development. They are intuitively acquired in early childhood and differentiate in further development. However, when children enter school, there already are considerable individual differences in children's visual-spatial and numerical abilities.