Younger children have more difficulty in sharing attention between two concurrent tasks than do older participants, but in addition to this developmental change, we documented changes in the nature of attention sharing. We studied children 6-8 and 10-14 years old and college students (in all, 104 women and 76 men; 3% Hispanic, 3% Black or African…

This study investigates the relationship between Turkish EFL learners' beliefs about language learning and learner features, such as gender, age, and language proficiency level. The study was conducted at Anadolu University, School of Foreign Languages, with the participation of 242 Turkish prep school EFL students with different levels of English…

The ability to categorize concepts is an essential capability for human thinking and action. On the one hand, the investigation of such abilities is the purview of psychology; on the other hand, subject-specific educational research is also of interest, as a number of research works in the field of science education show. For computer science…

Lecturing is often touted as a means to inspire students' interest, despite evidence that most lectures fail to do so. This study examines triggers of students' situational interest during lectures. Students (N = 706) in 12 different individual one hour first year lectures in a UK university were surveyed at the end of the lecture. They described…

Different learning tools are available within virtual learning environments, including forums, quizzes, and ePortfolios. This article investigates perceptions of helpfulness and ease of use of these three tools, including how they are impacted by learner characteristics and what predicts frequency of use of each tool. Critically, the relationship…

The authors investigate factors affecting Saudi students' educational experiences in Australian universities and their adjustment issues. The data comes from the survey of 100 Saudi international students in Sydney and subsequent interviews. The analysis revealed that language proficiency is the main barrier to Saudi students' academic and social…

When teachers or instructors create computer-based learning environments, they often solely consider technical aspects of interactivity. As a consequence, learners' main role is to respond to requests of the learning environment (e.g. by answering multiple-choice questions). This aspect of interactivity is, however, not sufficient to understand…

The main purpose of this study is to analyze Turkish tertiary level EFL learners' attributions to success and failure and the effects of gender, age, and perceived success on their attributions. The results indicated that EFL learners respectively attributed interest, ability, task difficulty, effort, luck and the influence of teacher and school…

Students often rate courses in research methods negatively and regard them as difficult. This study used the Attitudes towards Research Scale (Papanastasiou, 2005) to assess the attitudes of 201 randomly selected postgraduate students of teacher education programs from public and private universities in Pakistan. It was hypothesized that students…

This study examined trends in the practice of granting special consideration for missed tests and late papers in colleges and universities. We analyzed a database of 4,183 special consideration requests at a large Canadian university between 1998 and 2008. Results show a growing rate of requests per enrolment between 2001 and 2007. Although…

The success of an e-learning intervention depends to a considerable extent on student acceptance and use of the technology. Therefore, it has become imperative for practitioners and policymakers to understand the factors affecting the user acceptance of e-learning systems in order to enhance the students' learning experience. Based on an extended…

Item Response Theory (IRT) models were applied to investigate the psychometric properties of the Arthur and Day's Advanced Progressive Matrices-Short Form (APM-SF; 1994) [Arthur and Day (1994). "Development of a short form for the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices test." "Educational and Psychological Measurement, 54," 395-403] in order to test…

Students' perceptions of their classroom English tests play a crucial role in affecting their performance. Hence, the present study is interested in soliciting college students' perceptions of their classroom English tests to find out the reasons behind test difficulties. Participants were 585 female college students chosen randomly from all grade…

This study uses a moving windows self-paced reading task to assess both text comprehension and processing time of authentic texts and these same texts simplified to beginning and intermediate levels. Forty-eight second language learners each read 9 texts (3 different authentic, beginning, and intermediate level texts). Repeated measures ANOVAs…

The present study investigated the extent to which the impact of motor difficulty on the acquisition of a computer task varies as a function of age. Fourteen young and 14 older participants performed 352 sequences of 10 serial pointing movements with a wireless pen on a digitiser tablet. A conditional probabilistic structure governed the…