Comprehension substantially benefits from attending to, thinking about, and mentally representing the sources of any presented information. Such processes require mental effort and unfortunately people do not always engage in such activities. The current article presents a nascent, evolving model of discourse comprehension that formalizes…

In response to the paradigm shift of feedback from information to process, the notion of 'student feedback literacy', which refers to students' capacities and dispositions to use feedback, has been increasingly promulgated in the higher education assessment literature recently. Student feedback literacy has been conceptualized into three…

Working memory (WM) is used for storing information in a highly accessible state so that other mental processes, such as reasoning, can use that information. Some WM tasks require that participants not only store information, but also reason about that information to perform optimally on the task. In this study, we used visual WM tasks that had…

In our everyday life, we often need to anticipate the potential occurrence of events and their consequences. In this context, the way we represent contingencies can determine our ability to adapt to the environment. However, it is not clear how agents encode and organize available knowledge about the future to react to possible states of the…

Previous research has shown that there is a time cost (i.e., a resumption lag) associated with resuming a task following an interruption and that the longer the duration of the interruption, the greater the time cost (i.e., resumption lag increases as interruption duration increases). The memory-for-goals model (Altmann & Trafton, 2002)…

Researchers have extensively documented how various statistical properties of words (e.g., word frequency) influence lexical processing. However, the impact of lexical variables on nonword decision-making performance is less clear. This gap is surprising, because a better specification of the mechanisms driving nonword responses may provide…

Proactive career behaviors become increasingly important in today's career environment, but little is known about how and when motivational patterns affect individual differences. In a six-month longitudinal study among German university students (Study 1; N = 289) it was demonstrated that motivation in terms of "can do" (self-efficacy…

The present study used the stimulus onset delay paradigm to investigate eye movement control in reading and in scene viewing in a within-participants design. Short onset delays (0, 25, 50, 200, and 350 ms) were chosen to simulate the type of natural processing difficulty encountered in reading and scene viewing. Fixation duration increased…

This study investigated second language (L2) learners' perception of L2 sounds as an individual difference that predicted their improvement in pronunciation after receiving instruction. Learners were given explicit pronunciation instruction in a series of modules added to their Spanish as a foreign language curriculum and were then tested on their…

Most self-regulated learning theories are imbedded within a social-cognitive framework and comprise cognitive, metacognitive and motivational components. Nevertheless, these theories partly neglect volition, which is necessary for implementing learning intentions. Therefore, the present study is frontline as it aimed to integrate volition within a…

The tremendous effectiveness of intelligent tutoring systems is due in large part to their interactivity. However, when learners are free to choose the extent to which they interact with a tutoring system, not all learners do so actively. This paper examines a study with a natural language tutorial dialogue system for computer science, in which…

A large part of the empirical research in the field of visual attention has focused on various concrete paradigms. However, as yet, there has been no clear demonstration of whether or not these paradigms are indeed measuring the same underlying construct. We collected a very large data set (nearly 1.3 million trials) to address this question. We…

This study analyzes latent change scores using latent curve models (LCMs) for evaluation research with pre-post-post designs. The article extends a recent article by Willoughby, Vandergrift, Blair, and Granger (2007) on the use of LCMs for studies with pre-post-post designs, and demonstrates that intervention effects can be better tested using…

Moss and Albery (2009) presented a dual-process model of the alcohol-behavior link, integrating alcohol expectancy and alcohol myopia theory. Their integrative theory rests on a number of assumptions including, first, that alcohol expectancies are associations that can be activated automatically by an alcohol-relevant context, and second, that…

The purpose of this study is to propose a 6-T model (Tool, Toy, Telephone, Territory, Treasure of Information, and Trade) to explore college students' Internet-related attitudes, and to examine whether gender and grade level make any difference in their attitudes. Data from 1069 participants were collected from 96 Taiwanese universities and…