When students are solving problems they often turn to examples when they need assistance. Examples are helpful because they illustrate how a problem can be solved. However, when examples are very similar to the problems, students default to copying the example solutions, which hinders learning. To address this, prior work has investigated the…

Social studies education (SSE) commonly uses copying pedagogies (e.g., simulations) to help students develop a deeper understanding of self, others, curriculum, and society. This article argues that simulations are eminently mimetic (i.e., a theoretical orientation concerned with understanding the entangled relationships between originals and…

The objective for beginning writers is to learn how to generate alphabet-letters which are recognisable and easy to read. This study investigated the accuracy of Year 1 and 2 children's alphabet-letter-writing by evaluating their alphabet and orthographic knowledge, following evidence which identifies these skills as important for correctly…

Gestures and other bodily movements are frequently used as instructional strategies in second language classrooms. Research has demonstrated that gestures are an effective strategy to improve L2 vocabulary recall. However, previous studies have only used vocabulary items that are known to participants in their native languages. Additionally,…

This study assessed the effects of four types of teaching instruction for Hangul learning in Korean kindergartners. Forty-five four-year-old children participated in a Hangul learning experiment where they were taught 6 new Korean Guljas (Korean written syllable) in each of four conditions--whole Gulja, alphabet letter, CV (consonant + vowel) body…

Hindi graphs, called akshara, are difficult to learn because of their visual complexity and large set of graphs. Akshara containing multiple consonants (complex akshara) are particularly difficult. In Hindi, complex akshara are formed by fusing individual consonantal graphs. Some complex akshara look similar to their component parts (transparent),…

Phenomenography is internationally well-known for its use in studying learning and teaching in educational settings. This paper begins with the discussion of two approaches reported in the literature to study classroom teaching in the phenomenography tradition. The paper goes on to put forward a third approach that is in essence to return to the…

This study explores the possibility that early word segmentation is aided by infants' tendency to segment words with repeated syllables ("reduplication"). Twenty-four nine-month-olds were familiarized with passages containing one novel reduplicated word and one novel non-reduplicated word. Their central fixation times in response to…

How do native Chinese-speaking (CS) and non-Chinese-speaking (NCS) children learn to read and write in Chinese? In the present study, 29 CS and 34 NCS second and third graders aged 76 to 122 months (M = 93.65) participated in an experiment where they were taught 16 new Chinese characters in one of four conditions--copy, radical, phonological and…

Although copying and name writing skills are regarded as the indicators of handwriting development in alphabetic writing systems, there is limited information on logographs such as Chinese. Chinese characters are not only simply a combination of strokes as letters in English, but also place a great demand on visuospatial ability to maintain good…

Although formal aural musicianship learning is prevalent in university and conservatory music curricula, an informal "ear-copying" approach can be an alternative. In this study, the formal "Written task" approach was taught weekly to a class of university music majors by the teacher-researcher, but an extra ear-copying…

Mimicry involves unconsciously copying the actions of others. Increasing evidence suggests that autistic people can copy the goal of an observed action but show differences in their mimicry. We investigated mimicry in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) within a two-dimensional virtual reality environment. Participants played an imitation game with a…

Two randomised control experiments examined spelling outcomes in a repeated measures design (pre-test, post-tests; 1-day, 1-month follow-up, 5-month follow-up), where students learned Spanish irregular words through (1) immediate feedback using self-correction, (2) visual imagery where children imagine and represent words using movement, and (3)…

This article explores how student behaviour and interactions change when teachers use "producing" as a primary pedagogical strategy (Papert, 1980; Ejsing-Duun and Karoff, 2014). Based on observed student and teacher actions and responses, as well as students' production, this paper emphasizes the importance of understanding how students…

The instructional level is helpful when identifying an intervention for math or reading, but researchers have yet to investigate whether the instructional-level concept can be applied to early writing. The purpose of this study was to replicate and extend previous research by examining technical features of potential instructional-level criteria…