The aim of the current study is to investigate the effect of using life wide learning approach on developing English language Fluency for prep. stage students in the official Language Schools. The study adopted the one-group pre-post experimental design, with a pre-post fluency test along with a triangulation method that integrates both…

Improving perceptions of graduate utility is fundamental to Higher Education's employability and skills agenda. However, utility enhancement is a ubiquitous consequence of all learning. Therefore, motivating students to engage in deep learning to improve their utility is problematic. Using the student voice, in this article, I explain how prompts…

A robust finding in the literature is that spacing material leads to better retention than massing; however, the benefit of spacing for concept learning is less clear. When items are massed, it may help the learner to discover the relationship between instances, leading to better abstraction of the underlying concept. Two experiments addressed…

While the purposes of design and science are often different, they share some key practices and processes. Design-based science learning, which combines the processes of engineering design with scientific inquiry, is one attempt to engage students in scientific reasoning via solving practical problems. Although research suggests that engaging…

This study assesses the effects of the use of learning strategies on student literacy performance based on the 2002 Hong Kong Program for International Student Assessment. The descriptive statistics show that students use the memorization strategy almost as frequently as the elaboration strategy. Independent sample t-tests reveal that female…

In order to better understand how to design hands-on child-computer interaction, we explore how different styles of interaction facilitate children's thinking while they use their hands to manipulate objects. We present an exploratory study of children solving a spatial puzzle task. We investigate how the affordances of physical, graphical…

This article reports findings from a strategy intervention study involving a treatment class (N=20) and a comparison class (N=20) in an ESL oral setting. Oral communication strategies were taught to the treatment class. A data-collection method comprising stimulated recall interviews that aimed to investigate respectively the learning process…

The authors have been engaged in research focused on students' depth of learning as well as teachers' efforts to foster deep learning. Findings from a study examining the teaching practices and student learning outcomes of sixty-four teachers in seventeen different states (Smith et al. 2005) indicated that most of the learning in these classrooms…

Inquiry learning requires the ability to understand that theory and evidence have to be distinguished and co-ordinated. Moreover, learners have to be able to control two or more independent variables when formulating hypotheses, designing experiments and interpreting outcomes. Can sixth-grade (9-10 years) children be trained to acquire these…

This article explores relationships between feedback, group learning, and performance. It considers how feedback to individuals and the group as a whole supports continuous group learning. Feedback source, purpose, clarity, and valence may affect perceptions, processing, and outcomes of feedback. How feedback is processed and used may be…

Contemporary theories of learning postulate one or at most a small number of different learning mechanisms. However, people are capable of mastering a given task through qualitatively different learning paths such as learning by instruction and learning by doing. We hypothesize that the knowledge acquired through such alternative paths differs…

One potential approach to the authentic assessment of what students know and can do in science is concept mapping. A concept map is a graph consisting of nodes representing concepts and labeled lines denoting the relation between a pair of nodes (concepts). The external concept map constructed by the student is interpreted as representing…

This newsletter reports on the activities of Equipped for the Future (EFF), which is a National Institute for Literacy (NIFL) initiative that develops content standards to ensure that every adult can gain the knowledge and skills needed to fulfill real-world responsibilities as workers, parents, and citizens. A message from the NIFL…