I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/s15516709cog1202_4

Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/s15516709cog0502_2

Categorization and Representation of Physics Problems by Experts and Novices

A framework for conceptualizing the development of individual differences in reading ability is presented that synthesizes a great deal of the research literature. The framework places special emph...

Matthew effects in reading: Some consequences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy.

The purpose of this article is to review basic empirical results from the psychological literature in a way that provides a useful foundation for research on consumer knowledge. A conceptual organization for this diverse literature is provided by two fundamental distinctions. First, consumer expertise is distinguished from product-related experience. Second, five distinct aspects, or dimensions, of expertise are identified: cognitive effort, cognitive structure, analysis, elaboration, and memory. Improvements in the first two dimensions are shown to have general beneficial effects on the latter three. Analysis, elaboration, and memory are shown to have more specific interrelationships. The empirical findings related to each dimension are reviewed and, on the basis of those findings, specific research hypotheses about the effects of expertise on consumer behavior are suggested.

Dimensions of Consumer Expertise

http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/teaching/F12/cs200/Readings/larkin.whyadiagramissometimesworth.1987.pdf

Why a Diagram is (Sometimes) Worth Ten Thousand Words

Although a sizable body of knowledge is prerequisite to expert skill, that knowledge must be indexed by large numbers of patterns that, on recognition, guide the expert in a fraction of a second to relevant parts of the knowledge store. The knowledge forms complex schemata that can guide a problem's interpretation and solution and that constitute a large part of what we call physical intuition.

Expert and novice performance in solving physics problems

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/s15516709cog0404_1

Models of Competence in Solving Physics Problems

Solving arithmetic word problems links the ability to execute arithmetic operations and the ability to apply these operations in real-word situations. An appropriate recent interest in word problems has produced much data on the relative difficulty of different kinds of word problems, and some data on the strategies children use to solve these problems together with the kinds of errors they make. We also have accounts of problem difficulty based on descriptions of the problem, that is, on their structural variables or on their semantic structure. We present here and account of problem difficulty based on a description of the psychological processes of the child. The purpose of this article is to outline a model of these processes, made explicit in the form of a computer-implemented model. The model solves many common word problems by acting them out with representations of physical counters. More difficult problems require augmenting this procedure first with knowledge that one object is a member of both ...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/3233635

An integrated model of skill in solving elementary word problems.

An analysis and comparison of everyday life and the domain of science reveals significant differences in their goals and in the cognitive means used to attain these goals. Students' lack of awareness of these differences can lead to pervasive learning difficulties in their study of science. Thus many students (a) have erroneous conceptions of scientific goals, (b) import goals and ways of thinking which are effective in everyday life but inadequate in science, and (c) devise ways of thinking ill suited to science. Additional complications arise because science taught in schools often differs both from actual science and from everyday life. Students' learning difficulties are thus increased because scientific goals are distorted and scientific ways of thinking are inadequately taught. The preceding analysis suggests some empirical investigations and instructional improvements.

Jill H. Larkin

Papers

Why a Diagram is (Sometimes) Worth Ten Thousand Words

Expert and novice performance in solving physics problems

Models of Competence in Solving Physics Problems

An integrated model of skill in solving elementary word problems.

Cognition in Scientific and Everyday Domains: Comparison and Learning Implications.