The purposes of this study were (1) to introduce a virtual dental lab designed to support students' virtual clinical examinations in a dentistry program in South Korea and (2) to determine how dental students' levels of expertise (low, medium, or high) influence their clinical performance in terms of dwell time on each tooth location, total…

Assessing students on-the-fly is an important but challenging task for teachers. In initial teacher education, a call has been made to better prepare pre-service teachers for this complex task. Advances in technology allow this training to be done through authentic learning environments, such as video-based simulations. To understand the learning…

This study reports an investigative study with 55 English-major participants in a Chinese university about using simulation in business English correspondence teaching. The study found that participants had strong needs in practical skills development and learning business English correspondence writing. The simulation approach was perceived to be…

When there are no personal consequences associated with test performance for examinees, rapid guessing (RG) is a concern and can differ between subgroups. To date, the impact of differential RG on item-level measurement invariance has received minimal attention. To that end, a simulation study was conducted to examine the robustness of the…

This study reports an investigative study of using case study approach in business English teaching in the Chinese university context. The research instruments used were survey questionnaires containing both ratings and open-ended questions, which were administered to 127 English major undergraduates at the beginning and end of the "Business…

Participation in international large-scale assessments has grown over time with the largest, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), including more than 70 education systems that are economically and educationally diverse. To help accommodate for large achievement differences among participants, in 2009 PISA offered…

International relations is often confusing for students. IR theories are introduced as parsimonious and elegant and then systematically challenged as students learn more about detailed events. There are rules, there are norms, and states follow them until they don't. East Asia increases these challenges because it often undermines IR theory.…

This study was carried out to investigate pre-service teachers' perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, attitude and intentions towards the utilization of virtual laboratory package in teaching and learning of Nigerian secondary school physics concepts. Descriptive survey research was employed and 66 fourth and fifth year Physics education…

Cultivating EFL learners' critical thinking ability is an urgent task for English teachers. To integrate the training of language skills and cultivation of critical thinking ability into one language course, the author designed an activity called simplified Modal United Nations conference, which is based on the revised Bloom's Taxonomy that…

This article reports the analysis of six urban contexts in which a practical tool measuring individual skills concerning household waste recycling was tested. The tool is a structured questionnaire including a simulation task that assesses respondents' abilities to sort household waste adequately in a given context/municipality. Results indicate…

Despite the widespread interest in using and researching simulation in higher education, little discussion has yet to address a key pedagogical concern: difficulty. A "sociomaterial" view of learning, explained in this paper, goes beyond cognitive considerations to highlight dimensions of material, situational, representational and…

This qualitative study indicates that Chinese origin students completing their pre-university education in a British school have particular difficulties related to sociocultural change, pedagogical differences, affective aspects, cognitive demand and language learning. These are discussed. The use of a pre-laboratory software resource to support…

The aim of this study is to investigate pre-service teacher's cognitive load types (intrinsic load-IL, extraneous load-EL, and germane load-GL), academic achievements, and affective characteristics (attitude and self-efficacy) at two stages of experimental learning processes. The first and the second groups used explanatory instructional…

Optimizing the usability of e-learning materials is necessary to reduce extraneous cognitive load and maximize their potential educational impact. However, this is often neglected, especially when time and other resources are limited. We conducted a randomized trial to investigate whether a usability evaluation of our multimedia e-learning…

Fisher's information measure for the item difficulty parameter in the Rasch model and its marginal and conditional formulations are investigated. It is shown that expected item information in the unconditional model equals information in the marginal model, provided the assumption of sampling examinees from an ability distribution is made. For the…