Last week, the CORE Lab was visited by the wonderful Lillian Asiala! Lillian recently received her doctorate in cognitive and instructional psychology from Northern Illinois University. The central themes of her research are discourse processes, text comprehension, and scientific literacy. Lillian presented her work on how the inclusion of causal connective “because” affects students’ evaluations of explanations and comprehension of scientific literature. She looked at this phenomenon across various levels of experience in upper level science courses and expertise in logical reasoning. It was interesting to hear about her work and discuss how it connects to the CORE Lab’s ongoing work on scientific literacy and how cognitive construals affect student’s understanding of scientific articles. She presented for us at both our small council meeting and weekly lab meeting! Thanks again for visiting Lillian!