This multiple case study examined the experiences of elementary L2 learners who received instruction in either reciprocal teaching or the think aloud strategy (TAS), and identified patterns of use that emerged from participants' employment of the strategies. The three L2 participants took a pre- test and a posttest, were recorded using the…

This study is part of a larger design study that iteratively improves a robotics programming curriculum as well as a computational thinking (CT) instrument. Its focus was majorly on CT assessment and particularly on an online CT instrument with logging functionality that can store a student's problem-solving process by recording interactions…

Scaffolding is a type of instructional support that helps students to complete a learning task that exceeds their current ability. Scaffolding plays an important role in augmenting other instructional approaches, such as problem-based learning, and facilitates gradual shifts of responsibility from the more advanced others to the learner (Belland,…

Background and Objectives: Graduates from undergraduate nursing programs report inadequate death education. Most death education is focused on end-of-life care and taught by lecture. Students are not provided opportunities to reflect on their own feelings about death. Due to lack of clinical nursing faculty and shortage of clinical sites, students…

This research investigates students' learning about the electron transport chain (ETC) process in photosynthesis by watching a video followed by playing a serious board game-Electron Chute- that models the ETC process. To accomplish this goal, several learning outcomes regarding the misconceptions students' hold about photosynthesis and the ETC…

Learning by example is nothing new to the education landscape. Research into think-aloud protocols, though often used as a form of assessment rather than instruction, provided practical, content-specific literacy strategies for crafting the instructional intervention in this study. Additionally, research into worked examples--from the earliest…

Complex productivity applications that integrate tasks in the workplace are becoming more common. Usability typically focuses on short-term, immediate measures of task performance. This study incorporates a long-term goal of more durable learning, focusing on implicit learning (spontaneous, unplanned, usually unconscious learning as a result of…

How do children use physical and virtual tools to develop new numerical knowledge? While concrete instructional materials may support the delivery of novel information to learners, they may also over-simplify the task, unintentionally reducing learners' performance in recall and transfer tasks. This reduction in testing performance may be…

Many current policy initiatives focus on teacher qualifications and high-stakes assessments for students as a means to improve mathematics education in the United States, but this approach ignores the actual practice of teaching through which students have opportunities to learn mathematics. The present study is an effort to answer scholars'…

This research used an evidenced-based experimental 2 x 2 factorial design General Linear Model with Repeated Measures Analysis of Covariance (RMANCOVA). For this analysis, time served as the within-subjects factor while treatment group (i.e., static and signaling, dynamic and signaling, static without signaling, and dynamic without signaling)…

Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive system that allows users to interact with virtual objects and the real world at the same time. The purpose of this dissertation was to explore how AR, as a new visualization tool, that can demonstrate spatial relationships by representing three dimensional objects and animations, facilitates students to…

Since the mid-1990s, the link between recasts and L2 development has been extensively tested, and the results from those studies have largely demonstrated that recasts have a positive effect on L2 learning. With this firm support from previous empirical evidence, studies have begun to focus on how recasts assist learning and under what conditions…

This dissertation tests a grammatical structure, differential object marking (DOM), which is particularly difficult for L2 learners to acquire. DOM is a phenomenon in which some direct objects are morphologically marked to distinguish them from subjects (Comrie, 1979). In Spanish, animate and specific direct objects are marked with the preposition…

Multiple factors have influenced testing agencies to more carefully consider the manner and frequency in which pretest item data are collected and analyzed. One potentially promising development is judges' estimates of item difficulty. Accurate estimates of item difficulty may be used to reduce pretest samples sizes, supplement insufficient…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of visual representations and time-compressed instruction on learning and learners' perceptions of cognitive load. Time-compressed instruction refers to instruction that has been increased in speed without sacrificing quality. It was anticipated that learners would be able to gain a conceptual…