Elementary school multicultural reading curricula include characters with diverse proper names, which are often unfamiliar and differ phonetically from students' native language. These names could impact reading outcomes by increasing students' cognitive load and/or creating cognitive disfluency. In Study 1, students in grades 1 through 2 read a…

Introduction: Under the influence of Vygotsky, dynamic assessment (DA) has recently crept into the realm of L2 testing to assess learners' cognitive modification through the concept of mediation and zone of proximal development (ZPD) (Ableeva, The Effects of Dynamic Assessment on L2 Listening Comprehension 2008; Lantolf, Sociocultural theory and…

This study seeks to investigate the impact of symmetrical (S) and Asymmetrical (AS) scaffolding, which are two types of scaffolding, on students' reading comprehension achievement of English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The study was done in two phases: In the first phase after administering a Pre-test, 52 homogeneous intermediate students were…

Vygotsky (1978) presented ideas influential to the "constructivist" approach to education. This approach included the "zone of proximal development," and defined what is essential for student's development of a higher cognitive ability in order to become self-motivated learners. His theory also directly relates to the research regarding the…

This study sought to determine the basis for young children's understanding of fundamental addition and subtraction processes, and to expose any limitations on such arithmetic reasoning. Thirty-six two-year-olds and 36 three-year-olds participated in six experiments which examined children's relational quantity judgments about pairs of arrays in…

This book shows how to increase one's power to analyze and comprehend problems. First, it outlines and illustrates the methods that good problem solvers use in attacking complex ideas. Then it gives some practice in applying these methods to a variety of questions in comprehension and reasoning. Chapters include: (1) "Test Your Mind--See How…

Reports on misconceptions held by intermediate grade students concerning chemistry textbook concepts, on the relation of reasoning ability to those misconceptions, and on the extent that textbooks encourage misconceptions. Concludes that the level of understanding displayed for the selected concepts, in combination with the nature of students'…