As speakers interact, they add references to their common ground, which they can then reuse to facilitate listener comprehension. However, all references are not equally likely to be reused. The purpose of this study was to shed light on how the speakers' conceptualizations of the referents under discussion affect reuse (along with a generation…

Since Rwanda decided that from 2009 English will be the sole medium of instruction from upper level primary school onwards, motivation for learning English has become an especially important issue. Therefore this study investigated motivation for Rwandan primary and secondary school students to learn English. The study was carried out in Nyagatare…

Cross-grade studies are valuable for the development of sequential curriculum. However such studies are time and resource intensive and fail to provide a clear representation to integrate different levels of representational complexity. Lin (Lin, 2006; Lin & Chiu, 2006; Lin, Chiu, & Hsu, 2006) proposed a cladistics approach in conceptual…

Science education research has revealed a number of student mental models for atomic structure, among which, the one based on Bohr's model seems to be the most dominant. The aim of the current study is to investigate the coherence of these models when students apply them for the explanation of a variety of situations. For this purpose, a set of…

The authors examined the following questions: Does gender influence the ethicality of enterprise students to a greater extent than it does nascent entrepreneurs? If this is the case, then is it due to factors associated with adulthood such as age, work experience, marital status, and parental status? Sex-role socialization theory and moral…

Empirical evidence supporting frame-of-reference (FOR) training as an effective intervention for calibrating raters is convincing. Yet very little is known about who does better or worse in FOR training. We conducted a field study of how motivational factors influence affective, cognitive, and behavioral learning outcomes, as well as near transfer…

The study aims were to examine the relationships of 128 elderly couples married longer than 45 years and the role division between the partners, including a comparison of their perceptions of their first 3 years of their marriage with today. The research hypotheses were (a) there will be a change in the couple's perceptions about the traditional…

This study aims to be a contribution to a theoretical model that explains the effectiveness of the learning and decision-making processes by means of a feedback and mental models perspective. With appropriate mental models, managers should be able to improve their capacity to deal with dynamically complex contexts, in order to achieve long-term…

We hypothesize that cultural narratives such as myths and folktales are more likely to achieve cultural stability if they correspond to a minimally counterintuitive (MCI) cognitive template that includes mostly intuitive concepts combined with a minority of counterintuitive ones. Two studies tested this hypothesis, examining whether this template…

An eyetracking study testing D. L. Medin and M. M. Schaffer's (1978) 5-4 category structure was conducted. Over 30 studies have shown that the exemplar-based generalized context model (GCM) usually provides a better quantitative account of 5-4 learning data as compared with the prototype model. However, J. D. Smith and J. P. Minda (2000) argued…

Conjunctive item response models are introduced such that (a) sufficient statistics for latent traits are not necessarily additive in item scores; (b) items are not necessarily locally independent; and (c) existing compensatory (additive) item response models including the binomial, Rasch, logistic, and general locally independent model are…

This study reports two experiments which indicate that the processes of providing subjects with insightful representations of example programs and guiding subjects through an "ideal" problem solving strategy facilitate learning. A production system model (GRAPES) has been developed that simulates problem-solving and learning in the…

Does collaborative learning in asynchronous discussion groups result in enhancing academic discourse and knowledge construction? This general research question has been researched in a study involving 300 students, working during six months in 38 electronic discussion groups. The transcripts of the discussions were coded and analysed to test…

Examines simulation in entrepreneurial research, reviews cognitive structures and theories, and presents a computerized simulation of strategic decision-making in situational stereotype conditions for entrepreneurial companies. The study suggests repeated exposure to a pattern recognition issue in entrepreneurship may lead to a broader…

Two studies were conducted to compare the advance organizer and concept elaboration models of instruction with a task analysis approach. It was hypothesized that the concept elaboration group would achieve significantly higher than either the advance organizer group or the task analysis group on concept learning and principle learning. A pilot…