Purpose: Many aided augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) systems require the use of an external display that is represented via a visual modality. It is critical to evaluate and understand visual-perceptual processing in individuals with disabilities who could benefit from AAC. One way to evaluate how individuals process visual…

For this study, 11 children with moderate to severe autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were given directives containing prepositions in three cue conditions: (a) spoken alone, (b) a short video clip along with spoken cues, and (c) a sequence of three graphic symbols accompanied by spoken cues. Participants followed directives significantly more…

Theories of visual narrative understanding have often focused on the changes in meaning across a sequence, like shifts in characters, spatial location, and causation, as cues for breaks in the structure of a discourse. In contrast, the theory of visual narrative grammar posits that hierarchic "grammatical" structures operate at the…

The two-high-threshold (2HT) model of recognition memory assumes that people make memory errors because they fail to retrieve information from memory and make a guess, whereas the continuous unequal-variance (UV) model and the low-threshold (LT) model assume that people make memory errors because they retrieve misleading information from memory.…

How do children map linguistic representations onto the conceptual structures that they encode? In the present studies, we provided 3-4-year-old children with minimal-pair scene contrasts in order to determine the effect of particular event properties on novel verb learning. Specifically, we tested whether spatiotemporal cues to causation also…

Schmoker argues that having students write regularly across the disciplines, connecting written work to content in the discipline to facilitate student understanding about content, would boost most students' academic achievement. We must "demystify" writing instruction, distilling it to key skills that any teacher can guide students to…

First graders engaged in an extended historical inquiry. Close readings of secondary and primary sources evoked rich class discussion. Scaffolding directed students' scrutiny of secondary sources for historical gaps; they ably detected source and intent within the primary sources. Students articulated newly constructed understandings through…

A crucial component of numerical understanding is one's ability to abstract numerical properties regardless of varying perceptual attributes. Evidence from numerical match-to-sample tasks suggests that children find it difficult to match sets based on number in the face of varying perceptual attributes, yet it is unclear whether these findings are…

Colleges and universities are increasingly adopting various software solutions to raise degree completion rates and lower costs (Ferguson, 2012; Vendituoli, 2014; Yanosky, 2014). Student success software, also known as Integrated Planning and Advising Services (IPAS), appears to be in high demand among both students and faculty (Dahlstrom &…

Children ages 18 and 24 months were assessed for the ability to understand and learn from an adult's nonverbal expression of agreement and disagreement with a speaker's claims. In one type of communicative exchange, a speaker made 2 different claims about the identity or location of an object. The hearer nodded her head in agreement with one claim…

How can we explain children's understanding of the unseen world? Young children are generally able to distinguish between real unobservable entities and fantastical ones, but they attribute different characteristics to and show less confidence in their decisions about fantastical entities generally endorsed by adults, such as Santa Claus. One…

While considerable effort has been invested to increase FAFSA completion among high school seniors, there has been much less investment to ensure that college freshmen re-apply for financial aid. Text messaging is a promising approach to inform students of important stages in the financial aid re-application process and to connect them to…

Recent research on moment-to-moment language comprehension has revealed striking differences between adults and preschool children. Adults rapidly use the "referential principle" to resolve syntactic ambiguity, assuming that modification is more likely when there are 2 possible referents for a definite noun phrase. Young children do not.…

Peer Instruction, a well-known student-centered teaching method, engages students during class through structured, frequent questioning and is often facilitated by classroom response systems. The central feature of any Peer Instruction class is a conceptual question designed to help resolve student misconceptions about subject matter. We provide…

Distributional information is a potential cue for learning syntactic categories. Recent studies demonstrate a developmental trajectory in the level of abstraction of distributional learning in young infants. Here we investigate the effect of prosody on infants' learning of adjacent relations between words. Twelve- to thirteen-month-old infants…