Fostering lifelong learning (LLL) is a topic of high relevance for current educational policy. School lays the cornerstone for the key components of LLL, specifically persistent motivation to learn and self-regulated learning behavior. The present study investigated the impact of classroom instruction variables on concrete determinants for these…

For self-regulated learning to be effective, students need to be able to accurately assess their own performance on a learning task and use this assessment for the selection of a new learning task. Evidence suggests, however, that students have difficulties with accurate self-assessment and task selection, which may explain the poor learning…

The purpose of two experiments was to contrast instructions to generate drawings with two text-focused strategies--main idea selection (Exp. 1) and summarization (Exp. 2)--and to examine whether these strategies could help students learn from a chemistry science text. Both experiments followed a 2 x 2 design, with drawing strategy instructions…

Developing fluency and flexibility in mathematics is a key goal of upper primary schooling, however, while fluency can be developed with practice, designing activities that support the development of flexibility is more difficult. Drawing on concepts of adaptive expertise, we developed a task for a multi-touch classroom, NumberNet, that aimed to…

The acquisition of addition facts was investigated in a practice study. Participants were 103 Grade 1 children who practiced simple addition problems with three different methods: (a) writing down the answer, (b) choosing between two alternative answers, and (c) filling in the second missing addend. On a test with simple addition problems,…

Two complementary studies, one in the laboratory and one in the field, compared the usage patterns and the effectiveness of interactive videos and illustrated textbooks when German secondary school students learned complex content. For this purpose, two videos affording different degrees of interactivity and a content-equivalent illustrated…

It is widely documented that the density property of rational numbers is challenging for students. The framework theory approach to conceptual change places this observation in the more general frame of problems faced by learners in the transition from natural to rational numbers. As students enrich, but do not restructure, their natural number…

Based on current theories of multimedia learning, we propose a strategy for learning from animations. Two different experimental studies were conducted in order to evaluate the strategy. In the first study, 22 sixth graders learned from an animation without the strategy while 21 students were encouraged to make use of the proposed strategy during…

Although writing learning journals is a powerful learning tool, instructional support is needed to overcome deficits in the use of self-regulated learning strategies. In a 2 x 2 experimental design with high-school students (N = 70), we analysed the effects of two modes of instruction (namely, informed prompting and learning-journal example) along…

English spelling, as well as in many other languages, consists of three elements: morphology, etymology and phonology. Spelling instruction, however, focuses primarily on phonology and there is a dearth of intervention studies that examine the effect of explicitly teaching all three elements to children. We report two studies, which examined 5- to…

This article investigates the effect of the vitality of historical issues in collective memory on students' history learning processes and products. Forty 12th grade students of different ethnic background participated in two historical problem-solving learning tasks. The historical issues were found to differ in their vitality in collective…

Within primary school classrooms children are often seated in groups but research shows that pupils do not collaborate or learn effectively within these groups. This study is focused on children 5-7 years old. Using a quasi-experimental design, children in experimental classes undertook relational activities to improve the effectiveness of group…

One hundred and forty-three Jewish and Arab 6th grade children in Israel participated in this study, which explored several attitude dimensions and willingness to communicate (WTC) in the language of the other. Analysis of variance indicated differences between groups, with Arab children having in general more positive attitudes and higher WTC in…

The present study investigated the effects of motivational instructions on interest, test anxiety, and text learning. Instructions to facilitate intrinsic and extrinsic motivation were compared with a "neutral" instruction. The sample consisted of 375 ninth-graders. Text-related interest and test anxiety were assessed before and after the…

A new computerized environment introducing a variety of metacognitive support mechanisms (MSMs) in different phases of the problem-solving process was designed to influence students' transfer from solving structured problems (near transfer) to solving open-ended problems (far transfer). Two hundred and thirty one students (aged 13-14 years) were…