In the present research, we examined the relationship between readers' domain knowledge and their ability to judge their comprehension of novel domain-related material. Participants with varying degrees of baseball knowledge read five texts on baseball-related topics and five texts on non-baseball-related topics, predicted their performance, and completed tests for each text. Baseball knowledge was positively related to absolute accuracy within the baseball domain but was unrelated to relative accuracy within the baseball domain. Also, the readers showed a general underconfidence bias, but the bias was less extreme for higher knowledge readers. The results challenge common assumptions that experts' metacognitive judgments are less accurate than novices'. Results involving topic familiarity ratings and a no-reading control group suggest that higher knowledge readers are not more likely to ignore text-specific cues in favor of a domain familiarity heuristic, but they do appear to make more effective use of domain familiarity in predicting absolute performance levels.

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A central issue in education is how to support the spatial thinking involved in learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). We investigated whether and how the cognitive process of analogical comparison supports learning of a basic spatial concept in geoscience, fault. Because of the high variability in the appearance of faults, it may be difficult for students to learn the category-relevant spatial structure. There is abundant evidence that comparing analogous examples can help students gain insight into important category-defining features (Gentner in Cogn Sci 34(5):752-775, 2010). Further, comparing high-similarity pairs can be especially effective at revealing key differences (Sagi et al. 2012). Across three experiments, we tested whether comparison of visually similar contrasting examples would help students learn the fault concept. Our main findings were that participants performed better at identifying faults when they (1) compared contrasting (fault/no fault) cases versus viewing each case separately (Experiment 1), (2) compared similar as opposed to dissimilar contrasting cases early in learning (Experiment 2), and (3) viewed a contrasting pair of schematic block diagrams as opposed to a single block diagram of a fault as part of an instructional text (Experiment 3). These results suggest that comparison of visually similar contrasting cases helped distinguish category-relevant from category-irrelevant features for participants. When such comparisons occurred early in learning, participants were more likely to form an accurate conceptual representation. Thus, analogical comparison of images may provide one powerful way to enhance spatial learning in geoscience and other STEM disciplines.

Increasing people’s interest and involvement in science is a growing concern in education. Although many researchers and educators seek innovations for classroom instruction, much could be gained by harnessing the activities that people perform at their leisure. Although new media are constantly emerging, comic book reading remains a popular activity for children and adults. Recently, there has been an explosive increase in the creation of educational comic books, including many about science. This rapid increase in science comics far outstrips our understanding of how comics impact people’s beliefs and interests in science. In this theoretical article, we draw on research from cognitive science and education to discuss heretofore unexplored cognitive impacts of science comics. We propose several ways in which learning could be enhanced or impaired through reading science comics and discuss several broader issues related to the use of comic books in education, including individual differences and informal learning.

Capturing the nature of students' mental representations and how they change with learning is a primary goal in science education research. This can be challenging in spatially intense domains, such as geoscience, architecture, and engineering. In this research, we test whether sketching can be used to gauge level of expertise in geoscience, using new technology designed to facilitate this process. We asked participants with differing levels of geoscience experience to copy two kinds of geoscience images-photographs of rock formations and causal diagrams. To permit studying the process of sketching as well as the structure and content of the sketches, we used the CogSketch system (Forbus et al. 2011, Topics in Cognitive Science 3:648-666) to record the time course of sketching and analyze the sketches themselves. Relative to novices, geoscience students included more geological structures and relational symbols in their sketches of geoscience materials and were more likely to construct their sketches in a sequence consistent with the order of causal events. These differences appear to stem from differences in domain knowledge, because they did not show up in participants' sketches of materials from other fields. The findings and methods of this research