Multicontext theory offers an approach to designing learning experiences and environments that take into account varied ways of thinking and knowing, are relevant inside and outside of the classroom, and can both enrich and encompass the lives of students on and off campus (Chavez & Longerbeam, 2016; Ibarra, 2001, 2005). Educators can leverage…

School systems that use a one-size-fits-all model continue to under-serve nearly all of their students. These schools prepare young people for an industrial world that no longer exists. Rigid class structures are the norm. Little, if any, attention is given to the social and emotional skills that even the business community has listed as top…

Implementing instructional interventions to accommodate learner differences has received considerable attention. Among these individual difference variables, the empirical evidence regarding the pedagogical value of learning styles has been questioned, but the research on the issue continues. Recent developments in Web-based implementations have…

A local processing bias, referred to as "weak central coherence," has been postulated to underlie key aspects of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Little research has examined whether individual differences in this cognitive style can be found in typical development, independent of intelligence, and how local processing relates to executive control.…

What is a learning style? No one seems to know for sure. The language used by learning style theorists is filled with ambiguities. Price (2004) maintains that "learning style is often used as a metaphor for considering the range of individual differences in learning" (p. 681). Is learning style merely a fanciful metaphor or is it the wave of the…

The need has arise for the consideration of individual differences, to include their learning styles, learning orientations, preferences and needs in learning to allow learners engage and be responsible for their own learning, retain information longer, apply the knowledge more effectively, have positive attitudes towards the subject, have more…

Language learning strategies are used with the explicit goal of helping learners improve their knowledge and understanding of a target language. They are the conscious thoughts and behaviors used by students to facilitate language learning tasks and to personalize language learning process. Learning styles on the other hand, are "general…

The purpose of this pilot study was to examine the effects of perceptual learning style preferences on L2 lexical inferencing and whether learners with certain perceptual learning styles benefited more from an explicitly instructional program. Joy Reid's (1995) Perceptual Learning Style Preferences (PLSP) Inventory and a lexical inferencing test…

Background: Both ability (measured by power tests) and non-ability (measured by preference tests) individual difference measures predict academic school outcomes. These include fluid as well as crystalized intelligence, personality traits, and learning styles. This paper examines the incremental validity of five psychometric tests and the sex and…

This paper examines the relationship of age factor to second language acquisition. Age as an affective factor brings about different performance stages in second as well as first language learning. Traditionally, research in Critical Period Hypothesis and other variables has derived two major aspects of language learning--the younger = the better…

In Spring semester 2006, we conducted a study with 50 learners of German to investigate the use of a new measure (Cardenas-Claros, 2005) for research on the field independent/dependent (FID) cognitive style and CALL use. After the measure was administered, students worked on a CALL program for German that logs interaction. This paper reports the…

Two experiments explored the possibility that individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) partially reflect differences in the size of the search set from which items are retrieved. High- and low-WMC individuals were tested in delayed (Experiment 1) and continuous distractor (Experiment 2) free recall with varying list lengths. Across…

One of the major features of a computer based instruction (CBI) is its non-linear structure allowing learners the opportunity of flexible navigation to accommodate their own needs. However, this non-linear structure may cause problems such as inefficient navigation, being lost or cognitive overhead for some learners. The aim of this study is to…

This study focused on unprompted changes in children's analogical reasoning on geometric tasks and the additional effect of a short training procedure. Participants were 36 grade 1 level children (M = 6;8 years) divided over a not-trained and a trained condition. The study was a 5-sessions migrogenetic procedure, with a follow-up test session…

Diverse strategies for marking GCSE examinations have been identified, ranging from simple automatic judgements to complex cognitive operations requiring considerable expertise. However, little is known about patterns of strategy usage or how such information could be utilised by examiners. We conducted a quantitative analysis of previous verbal…