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Background: Eye movement modelling examples (EMME) are demonstrations in which learners' not only see a model's (e.g., a teacher's) task performance on a computer screen (as in regular video examples) but also the model's eye movements (represented as moving coloured dots overlaid on the screen). Thereby EMME help guide learners' attention towards the relevant information and can model cognitive strategies which are otherwise unobservable for learners. Objectives: This study investigated whether EMME can help to learn deductive reasoning strategies and how the presence/absence of a teacher's verbal explanation affects learning from EMME. Methods: Secondary education students (N = 137) were randomly assigned to study video examples under one of four conditions in a 2 (EMME: yes/no) x 2 (verbal explanations: yes/no) between-subjects design. Results and Conclusions: Results revealed only a beneficial effect of the presence of verbal explanations on performance on the practice problems, but no pretest-to-posttest learning gains. Implications: Seeing the teacher's eye movements does not appear to enhance learning of deductive reasoning. The presence/absence of the teacher's verbal explanation does not seem to affect learning deductive reasoning.

The ability to monitor and adjust our performance is crucial for adaptive behaviour, a key component of human cognitive control. One widely studied metric of this behaviour is post-error slowing (PES), the finding that humans tend to slow down their performance after making an error. This study is a first attempt at generalizing the effect of PES to an online adaptive learning environment where children practise mathematics and language skills. This population was of particular interest since the major development of error processing occurs during childhood. Eight million response patterns were collected from 150,000 users aged 5 to 13 years old for 6 months, across 23 different learning activities. PES could be observed in most learning activities and greater PES was associated with greater post-error accuracy. PES also varied as a function of several variables. At the task level, PES was greater when there was less time pressure, when errors were slower, and in learning activities focusing on mathematical rather than language skills. At the individual level, students who chose the most difficult level to practise and had higher skill ability also showed greater PES. Finally, non-linear developmental differences in error processing were found, where the PES magnitude increased from 6 to 9-years-old and decreased from 9 to 13. This study shows that PES underlies adaptive behaviour in an educational context for primary school students.

The exploration and/or manipulation of objects and materials, referred to as object-oriented play (OOP), is one of the most prominent activities children engage in during early childhood. Especially within early childhood education, it is important to be able to assess and understand OOP, its developmental trajectory, and developmental value. This can support early childhood educators to successfully guide or enrich children's OOP, so it becomes a context in which learning can take place. During the past decades, three dominant theoretical perspectives have explained and assessed certain (developmental) aspects of OOP: (1) genetic epistemology, (2) cultural historical psychology, and (3) evolutionary psychology. After reviewing the literature concerning OOP according to each theoretical perspective, this paper aims to synthesize these existing theories into a unified theoretical framework. This theoretical framework can be a starting point for future research on OOP in early childhood (education). We answer the following research questions: Q1. What are the defining labels and features of the exploration and/or manipulation of objects and materials by children in early childhood?; Q2. What is the developmental trajectory of the exploration and/or manipulation of objects and materials by children in early childhood?; Q3. What is the developmental value of the exploration and/or manipulation of objects and materials by children in early childhood?

The question of how learners' motivation influences their academic achievement and vice versa has been the subject of intensive research due to its theoretical relevance and important implications for the field of education. Here, we present our understanding of how influential theories of academic motivation have conceptualized reciprocal interactions between motivation and achievement and the kinds of evidence that support this reciprocity. While the reciprocal nature of the relationship between motivation and academic achievement has been established in the literature, further insights into several features of this relationship are still lacking. We therefore present a research agenda where we identify theoretical and methodological challenges that could inspire further understanding of the reciprocal relationship between motivation and achievement as well as inform future interventions. Specifically, the research agenda includes the recommendation that future research considers (1) multiple motivation constructs, (2) behavioral mediators, (3) a network approach, (4) alignment of intervals of measurement and the short vs. long time scales of motivation constructs, (5) designs that meet the criteria for making causal, reciprocal inferences, (6) appropriate statistical models, (7) alternatives to self-reports, (8) different ways of measuring achievement, and (9) generalizability of the reciprocal relations to various developmental, ethnic, and sociocultural groups.

In early childhood, young children frequently engage in object-oriented play. According to cultural-historical activity theory, object-oriented play provides children with opportunities to learn about the characteristics and cultural applications of objects and materials. These characteristics are referred to as rules or affordances of objects and materials. To date, what kind of rules children explore and follow, and how they do so, has not been extensively studied, even though the understanding of children's learning in object-oriented play is important for early childhood education. In the current explorative study, we analysed how six children aged between two and four years explore, follow, and impose rules during a 10-minute play activity in which they were presented with a fixed set of objects (e.g. oddly shaped blocks, boxes, abstract shaped puppets, etc.). Thematic analysis of video-observations revealed two themes: (1) children explore, follow and impose different types of rules using different strategies, increasing in complexity with age; and (2) children explore, follow or impose rules by various forms of repetition, with older children showing longer and more complex forms of repetition. In the discussion, these themes were interpreted using CHAT.

Research on the impact of guided investigation, including verbal guidance strategies, has expanded in the recent decade, and the current work contributes to this line of research in a museum context. The current in-depth study examines the impact of verbal guidance strategies on family learning at an open-ended museum exhibit, considering participants' individual characteristics. The experiments and conversations of 104 families were observed at an object motion exhibit. Results show that families, with and without guidance, investigated in a meaningful way by performing control-of-variables strategy experiments, investigating a range of variables, and formulating hypotheses and causal explanations. However, the results also show that the process of learning scientific concepts could be improved. Minimal interventions of museum educators positively affected the families' learning process by reducing the number of scientifically incorrect remarks. Interestingly, in addition to discussing the phenomenon, especially the families with highly educated parents discussed the topic of reliability of their experiments, which is an under-investigated aspect of learning through investigation. Only children's cognitive ability and not parental education was modestly, but consistently related to the families' performance.

While response time and accuracy indicate overall performance, their value in uncovering cognitive processes, underlying learning, is limited. A promising online measure, designed to track decision-making, is computer mouse tracking, where mouse attraction towards different locations may reflect the consideration of alternative response options. Using a speedy arithmetic multiple-choice game in an online adaptive learning environment, we examined whether mouse movements could reflect arithmetic difficulties when error rates are low. Results showed that mouse movements towards alternative responses in correctly answered questions mapped onto the frequency of errors made in this online learning system. This mapping was stronger for the younger children, as well as for easy arithmetic problems. On an individual level, users showed more mouse movement towards their previously made response errors than towards other alternative options. This opens the possibility of adapting feedback and instruction on an individual basis through mouse tracking.

Recently, students' interest in science has been conceptualized as a network model: the science interest network model (SINM) in which affective, behavioural and cognitive components interact together; building on science interest being a dynamic relational construct. In the current study, we combine the Australian Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006 and Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth 2008 data (N = 4758) to investigate relationships between the network characteristics of Year 10 students with their decision to enrol in a science course in Year 12. Specifically, we identified indicators central to the SINM and tested whether they predicted chemistry, physics and biology course enrolment. Students' intentions to pursue a science-related study or career (future intentions in science) and their enjoyment of science (science enjoyment) were the most central indicators for all three science courses. Centrality was strongly related to course enrolment (r = 0.36-0.74), lending support to the validity of network theory in the context of science interest, as central indicators may play an influential role within the network.

Deductive Mastermind is a deductive reasoning game that isimplemented in the online educational game system Math Gar-den. A good understanding of the difficulty of Deductive Mas-termind game instances is essential for optimizing the learningexperience of players. The available empirical difficulty rat-ings, based on speed and accuracy, provide robust estimationsbut do not explain why certain game instances are easy or hard.In previous work a logic-based model was proposed that suc-cessfully predicted these difficulty ratings. We add to this workby providing a model based on a different logical principle—that of eliminating hypotheses (dynamic epistemic logic) in-stead of reasoning by cases (analytical tableaux system)—thatcan predict the empirical difficulty ratings equally well. Weshow that the informational content of the different feedbacksgiven in game instances is a core predictor for cognitive dif-ficulty ratings and that this is irrespective of the specific logicused to formalize the game.

We present an information-theoretic approach to modeling childrens performance in a deductive reasoning game. Ourapproach takes cognitive limitations into account to model the interpretability of feedback that children receive during thegame. We use data of thousands of children, 5 to 12 years of age, from a popular online educational learning system. In theDeductive Mastermind game the player seeks to identify a hidden code that consists of a sequence of colors. The playersees a series of proposed codes together with corresponding feedback providing partial information about the similarity ofeach proposal and the hidden code. In Deductive Mastermind games, the proposals are set up such that deductive reasoningleads to a single possible hidden code. The games vary in code length, the number of possible colors, and the number ofproposals, resulting in game difficulties of various degrees.

Previous work suggests that adolescents are still refining acoustic-phonetic cue use in clear-speech perception. This study shows adolescents' immature perception of reduced speech, in which speech sounds are naturally deleted and merged within and across words. German adults and 16-year-olds listened to either German reduced or unreduced (few or full cues) part- and full phrases (without and with context) in a phrase-intelligibility task. As expected, adolescents had lower scores when adequate perception required flexible acoustic-phonetic cue use most, i.e., when hearing reduced speech without context. Participants also listened to reduced and unreduced words and pseudowords (no context) in a lexical decision task. Here, 16-year-olds had poorer and slower responses than adults overall and particularly when hearing pseudowords. Explanations for the age effects are discussed. We conclude that experience continues to refine linguistic representations, at least until adulthood.

In this article, a science interest network model (SINM) is introduced and a first empirical test of the model is presented. The SINM models interest as a dynamic relational construct, in which different interest components, that is, affective, behavioral, and cognitive components and related motivational components mutually reinforce one another within the development of interest. The dynamical relational perspective hypothesizes that the mutual interactions between interest components underlie the development of interest. Applying the SINM to the PISA 2015 data of 2 countries, that is, the Netherlands and Colombia, we were able to not only illuminate the structure of interactions between the different variables (i.e., indicators) in the networks of different groups of adolescents but we could also make predictions about which variables are of structural importance within the interest construct and as such worthwhile to test as potential candidates for intervention. Additionally, we were able to replicate earlier findings of the literature, namely that (a) enjoyment is central within the interest network and that (b) important structural differences exist in the interest network across countries, which, for instance, point to differences in domain specificity of interest between countries. While the network approach is sensitive to structural differences in science interest across countries, the network structure is stable across subgroups within countries. Future studies are proposed to test theoretically important assumptions of a dynamical perspective on interest, such as the causal role of different interest components in the development of interest.

Abstract Introduction Current guidelines advocate empirical antibiotic treatment (EAT) in haematological patients with febrile neutropenia. However, the optimal duration of EAT is unknown. In 2011, we have introduced a protocol, promoting discontinuation of carbapenems as EAT after 3 days in most patients and discouraging the standard use of vancomycin. This study assesses the effect of introducing this protocol on carbapenem and vancomycin use in high-risk haematological patients and its safety. Methods A retrospective before-after study was performed comparing a cohort from 2007 to 2011 (period I, before restrictive EAT use) with a cohort from 2011 to 2014 (period II, restrictive EAT use). Neutropenic episodes related to chemotherapy or stem cell transplantation (SCT) in patients with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) or high-risk myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) were analysed. The primary outcome was the use of carbapenems and vancomycin as EAT during neutropenia, expressed as days of therapy (DOT)/100 neutropenic days and analysed with interrupted time series (ITS). Also the use of other antibiotics was analysed. Safety measurements included 30-day mortality, ICU admittance within 30 days after start of EAT and positive blood cultures with carbapenem-susceptible microorganisms. Results Three hundred sixty-two neutropenic episodes with a median duration of 18 days were analysed, involving 201 patients. ITS analysis showed decreased carbapenem use with a step change of − 16.1 DOT/100 neutropenic days (95% CI − 26.77 to − 1.39) and an overall reduction of 21.6% (8.7 DOT/100 neutropenic days). Vancomycin use decreased with a step change of − 13.7 DOT/100 neutropenic days (95% CI − 23.75 to − 3.0) and an overall reduction of 54.7% (14.6 DOT/100 neutropenic days). The use of all antibiotics combined decreased from 155.6 to 138 DOT/100 neutropenic days, a reduction of 11.3%. No deaths directly related to early discontinuation of EAT were identified, also no notable difference in ICU-admission (9/116 in period I, 9/152 in period II) and positive blood cultures (4/116 in period I, 2/152 in period II) was detected. Conclusion The introduction of a protocol promoting restrictive use of EAT resulted in reduction of carbapenem and vancomycin use and appears to be safe in AML or high-risk MDS patients with febrile neutropenia during chemotherapy or SCT.

This study investigates how individual differences in 7- to 9-year-olds' curiosity relate to the inquiry-learning process and outcomes in environments differing in structure. The focus on curiosity as individual differences variable was motivated by the importance of curiosity in science education, and uncertainty being central to both the definition of curiosity and the inquiry-learning environment. Curiosity was assessed with the Underwater Exploration game (Jirout, J., & Klahr, D. (2012). "Children's scientific curiosity: In search of an operational definition of an elusive concept." "Developmental Review," 32, 125-160. doi:10.1016/j.dr.2012.04.002), and inquiry-based learning with the newly developed Scientific Discovery task, which focuses on the principle of designing informative experiments. Structure of the inquiry-learning environment was manipulated by explaining this principle or not. As intelligence relates to learning and possibly curiosity, it was taken into account. Results showed that children's curiosity was positively related to their knowledge acquisition, but not to their quality of exploration. For low intelligent children, environment structure positively affected their quality of exploration, but not their knowledge acquisition. There was no interaction between curiosity and environment structure. These results support the existence of two distinct inquiry-based learning processes--the designing of experiments, on the one hand, and the reflection on performed experiments, on the other--and link children's curiosity to the latter process.