Writing places heavy demands on students' cognitive capacity. Existing research suggests that planning before writing can help to alleviate this cognitive burden; thus improving the quality of student writing. In this explanatory sequential mixed-methods study, the researcher examined the efficacy of specific pre-planning tools on students'…

This study aims at comparing the effect of single- and dual-annotation modes, working memory (WM), and three tasks of different involvement loads (sentence writing, close deletion, and paragraph writing) on passive and active vocabulary development of proficient English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. While listening to an expository text,…

This study investigated the effect of visual signals on perceptual span in text search and the kinds of signal information that facilitate the search. Participants were asked to find answers to specific questions in chapter-length texts in either a normal or a window condition, where the text disappeared beyond a vertical 3 degrees gaze-contingent…

Participants imagined, drew, and wrote about novel alien creatures (cf. Ward, 1994). Judges rated the creativity of the drawings alone, paragraphs alone, or drawings and paragraphs together. Much prior research has examined how participants rely on available exemplars and categorical knowledge in this task; here we focus on understanding why some…

Recent assessment research joining cognitive psychology and psychometric theory has introduced a new technology, item generation. In algorithmic item generation, items are systematically created based on specific combinations of features that underlie the processing required to correctly solve a problem. Reading comprehension items have been more…