Summary. This paper describes an attempt to identify different levels of processing of information among groups of Swedish university students who were asked to read substantial passages of prose. Students were asked questions about the meaning of the passages and also about how they set about reading the passages. This approach allows processes and strategies of learning to be examined, as well as the outcomes in terms of what is understood and remembered. The starting point of this research was that learning has to be described in terms of its content. From this point differences in what is learned, rather than differences in how much is learned, are described. It was found that in each study a number of categories (levels of outcome) containing basically different conceptions of the content of the learning task could be identified. The corresponding differences in level of processing are described in terms of whether the learner is engaged in surface‐level or deep‐level processing.

This meta-analysis integrates 296 effect sizes reported in eye-tracking research on expertise differences in the comprehension of visualizations. Three theories were evaluated: Ericsson and Kintsch's (Psychol Rev 102:211-245, 1995) theory of long-term working memory, Haider and Frensch's (J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cognit 25:172-190, 1999) information-reduction hypothesis, and the holistic model of image perception of Kundel et al. (Radiology 242:396-402, 2007). Eye movement and performance data were cumulated from 819 experts, 187 intermediates, and 893 novices. In support of the evaluated theories, experts, when compared with non-experts, had shorter fixation durations, more fixations on task-relevant areas, and fewer fixations on task-redundant areas; experts also had longer saccades and shorter times to first fixate relevant information, owing to superiority in parafoveal processing and selective attention allocation. Eye movements, reaction time, and performance accuracy were moderated by characteristics of visualization (dynamics, realism, dimensionality, modality, and text annotation), task (complexity, time-on-task, and task control), and domain (sports, medicine, transportation, other). These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for theories of visual expertise in professional domains and their significance for the design of learning environments.Expertise in the comprehension of visualizations has gained growing attention over the past years (de Groot and

The purpose of this article is to offer some reflections on the relationships between digital technologies and learning. It is argued that activities of learning, as they have been practised within institutionalized schooling, are coming under increasing pressure from the developments of digital technologies and the capacities to store, access and manipulate information that such resources offer. Thus, the technologies do not merely support learning; they transform how we learn and how we come to interpret learning. The metaphors of learning currently emerging as relevant in the new media ecology emphasize the transformational and performative nature of such activities, and of knowing in general. These developments make the hybrid nature of human knowing and learning obvious; what we know and master is, to an increasing extent, a function of the mediating tools we are familiar with. At a theoretical and practical level, this implies that the interdependences between human agency, minds, bodies and technologies have to serve as foundations when attempting to understand and improve learning. Attempts to account for what people know without integrating their mastery of increasingly sophisticated technologies into the picture will lack ecological validity.

In the literature on children’s understanding of astronomical concepts, such as the shape of the earth and gravitation, the difficulties that children have in conceptualizing these phenomena have been documented in many studies. The purpose of this research is to critically scrutinize these findings by taking a situated and discursive perspective on reasoning (and cognitive development). Instead of viewing understanding as the overt expression of underlying mental models, children’s responses in interview studies should be regarded as situated and as dependent on the tools available as resources for reasoning. By modifying the interview situation through the introduction of a globe as a tool for thinking, the outcomes are radically different from those reported earlier. None of the problems that have been reported, where children, for instance, claim that people can fall off the earth, can be detected. Even among the youngest participants gravitation is often invoked as an explanatory concept. It is argued that the globe in this case serves as an efficient prosthetic device for thinking, and this illustrates the tool-dependent nature of human reasoning.