Argument writing is challenging for elementary students. Previous experimental research has focused on scaffolding rhetorical goals, leaving content goals relatively unexplored. In a randomized experiment, 73 students in grades 5, 6, and 7 wrote persuasive texts about difficult-to-classify vertebrates. Each student received one of three sets of…

Currently there is a general uncertainty about what makes collocations (i.e., fixed word combinations with specific, not easily interpreted relations between their components) hard for ESL learners to master, and about how to improve collocation recognition and learning process. This study explored and designed a comparative classification of…

The introduction of digital literacy practices has created a tension in academia, with many academics challenging the view that critical thinking can be fostered on social networks. A quasi-experimental study was conducted on two sections of university-level writing classrooms to determine if there were meaningful differences in the quality of…

Through in-class observations of teaching assistants (TAs) and students in the lab sections of a large introductory physics course, we study which TA behaviors can be used to predict student engagement and, in turn, how this engagement relates to learning. For the TAs, we record data to determine how they adhere to and deliver the lesson plan and…

Students' informal inferential reasoning (IIR) is often inconsistent with the normative logic underlying formal statistical methods such as Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), even after instruction. In two experiments reported here, student's IIR was assessed using an intuitive ANOVA task at the beginning and end of a statistics course. In both…

School summer vacation may create a significant gap in the learning cycle. Such a gap may be particularly detrimental for vulnerable children such as those with lower academic achievement due to learning and language disabilities, lower socio-economic environments or learning in a language other than their native language. The current exploratory…

The present study aimed to describe and evaluate a transformative, embodied, emergent learning approach to acquiring ecological literacy through higher education. A class of teacher candidates in a bachelor of education program filled out a survey, which had them rate their level of agreement with 15 items related to ecological macro-models.…

Can an electronic portfolio that is both a multimedia container for student work and a tool to support key learning processes have a positive impact on the literacy practices and self-regulated learning skills of students? This article presents the findings of a yearlong study conducted in three Canadian provinces during the 2007-2008 school year…

This article reports data on the retention of problem-solving performance after one month, four months, and six months, in three separate studies conducted in school settings involving a variety of grades and subjects. (Author/LMO)

The instructional components of mediation, a teaching technique used in dynamic assessment, were evaluated with 100 four-year-old children attending daycare or preschools in London, Ontario. The effects of familiarization with task materials, task-specific rule teaching, and elaborated feedback were assessed using a pretest-posttest design.…