Theory is an important element of literacy research. Research designs are informed by theories that explain what literacy is, how it develops, and how it should be taught and evaluated. Sociocultural theories emphasize the socially situated nature of literacies engagement and practices, whereas cognitive theories emphasize the underlying skills…

Between 2002 and 2014, the Institute of Education Sciences (Institute) supported over 400 projects focused on education technology through the National Center for Education Research (NCER) and the National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER). The majority of this work has been funded through Education Technology research topics of NCER…

The purpose of this compendium is to catalog NCER's and NCSER's contributions to social-behavioral research. Research undertaken as part of these projects is contributing to a knowledge base that ultimately aims to improve academic outcomes for students via improvements in students' social-behavioral competencies, teachers' practices, and the…

This paper describes a design-based implementation research (DBIR) approach to the development and trialling of a new generation massive open online course (ngMOOC) situated in an instructional setting of undergraduate mathematics at a regional Australian university. This process is underscored by two important innovations: (a) a basis in a…

Disciplinary literacy encompasses not only the ability to read the texts of a discipline, but also to engage in the practices and discourse of that discipline. At the center of the discipline of history is inquiry. For these students to move from their ninth grade expectations about history toward the authentic discipline of history, they would…

Since its inception in 2002, the National Center for Education Research (NCER) in the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has funded over 700 education research grants and over 60 education training grants. The research grants have supported exploratory research to build theory or generate hypotheses on factors that may affect educational…

New studies on how language learning occurs are beginning to chip away at some long-held notions about second-language acquisition and point to potential learning benefits for students who speak more than one language. New National Science Foundation-funded collaborations among educators, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and…

Problem finding is a creative process whereby individuals develop original ideas for study. Secondary science students who successfully participate in authentic, novel, open inquiry studies must engage in problem finding to determine viable and suitable topics. This study examined problem finding strategies employed by students who successfully…

The course for the final year project for engineering students, because of its strongly research-based, open-ended format, tends to not have well defined learning outcomes, which are also not aligned with any accepted pedagogical philosophy or learning technology. To address this problem, the revised Bloom's taxonomy table of Anderson and…

Exposure to marital psychological and physical abuse has been established as a risk factor for children's socio-emotional, behavioral, and cognitive problems. Understanding the processes by which children develop symptoms of psychopathology and deficits in cognitive functioning in the context of marital aggression is imperative for developing…

Responds to Robert Entman's call for the establishment of a paradigm of news framing research. Describes a research program which includes three paradigmatic outlooks, called cognitive, constructivist, and critical. Argues that the research program has benefited the communication discipline by encouraging researchers to use specific theories to…

The impact of the Minnesota Studies of Creative Behavior on education and their contributions to educational practices are assessed; national and international extensions of the Minnesota Studies are summarized. Research is cited and interpreted. Lists are provided of 200 publications in open sources related to the Minnesota Studies and 253…

This report documents research and development performed by principal investigators under the sponsorship of the Office of Naval Research Cognitive and Neural Sciences Division during fiscal year 1989. Programs are conducted under contracts and grants awarded on the basis of proposals received in response to a Broad Agency Announcement in the…

This study investigated the perceptual functioning of individuals whose Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI-168) profiles indicated schizophrenic tendencies, but who did not exhibit marked thought disorder. (Author)

This report presents two research studies. The first, an experiment using 176 fifth graders, tested three hypotheses: (1) When content is held constant across messages, different formats of a medium differentially call for mental skills. (2) Formats which call for the same skills in different ways affect learners differently. (3) The TV formats…