This study uses the theoretical framework of domain-specific problem solving to explore the procedures students use to solve multiple-choice problems about biology concepts. We designed several multiple-choice problems and administered them on four exams. We trained students to produce written descriptions of how they solved the problem, and this…

This study focuses on the investigation of the effects of computer simulation and animation (CSA) on students' cognitive processes in an undergraduate engineering course. The revised Bloom's taxonomy, which consists of six categories in the cognitive process domain, was employed in this study. Five of the six categories were investigated,…

The Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) has been used to assess student understanding of introductory concepts of electricity and magnetism because many of the items on the CSEM have strong distractor choices which correspond to students' alternate conceptions. Instruction is unlikely to be effective if instructors do not know…

Undergraduate biology education reform aims to engage students in scientific practices such as experimental design, experimentation, and data analysis and communication. Graphs are ubiquitous in the biological sciences, and creating effective graphical representations involves quantitative and disciplinary concepts and skills. Past studies…

This study investigates how cohesion manifests in readers' thought processes while reading texts when they are instructed to engage in self-explanation, a strategy associated with deeper, more successful comprehension. In Study 1, college students (n = 21) were instructed to either paraphrase or self-explain science texts. Paraphrasing was…

Skinfold assessment is valid and economical; however, it has a steep learning curve, and many programs only include one exposure to the technique. Increasing the number of exposures to skinfold assessment within an undergraduate curriculum would likely increase skill proficiency. The present study combined observational and Think Aloud…

This study examined to what extent English-speaking learners of Arabic demonstrated varied metalinguistic knowledge of a salient feature (head-direction) vs. an unsalient feature (definiteness) in the Arabic construct state. In addition, it examined whether this knowledge was utilized in form-focused task performance. In the target construction,…

Four experiments tested the idea that people distinguish between biconditional, conditional, and enabling intention conditionals by thinking about counterexamples. The experiments examined intention conditionals that contain different types of reasons for actions, such as beliefs, goals, obligations, and social norms, based on a corpus of 48…

Purpose: This study investigated the use of metalanguage as a mediational tool in understanding targeted grammatical concepts from the perspective of the Sociocultural approach (SCT) in learning a second language (L2). Methodology: The participants involved in this study were Malay undergraduates with low to intermediate proficiency in L2 English.…

High frequency hearing loss (HFHL), often related to hazardous noise, affects one in six U.S. adolescents. Yet, only 20 states include school-based hearing screens for adolescents. Only six states test multiple high frequencies. Study objectives were to (1) compare the sensitivity of state school-based hearing screens for adolescents to gold…

The design of online course materials is rarely informed by learning theories or their pedagogical implications. The goal of this research was to develop, implement and assess a virtual learning environment (VLE), SOFIAA, which was designed using the cognitive apprenticeship model (CAM), a pedagogical model based on learning-centered theory. We…

This study examined the effectiveness of three types of think aloud methods for understanding elementary teachers' cognitive processes as they used a professional development website. A methodology combining a retrospective think aloud procedure with screen capture technology (referred to as the virtual revisit) was compared with concurrent and…

This study focuses on the development of the understanding of historical time of pupils in primary school. We present a developmental model with three stages: "emergent," "initial" and "continued" understanding of historical time. Based on this model, we constructed an instrument to measure how pupils aged 6-12…

Reported in this article are initial results from of a longitudinal study to characterize the design cognition and cognitive design styles of high school students with and without pre-engineering course experience over a 2-year period, and to compare them with undergraduate engineering students. The research followed a verbal protocol analysis…

There are many questions about how EFL learners infer word meanings from context and what distinguishes successful from less successful inferencers. This study explored the lexical inferencing strategies used by EFL learners and the characteristics which distinguish successful from less successful inferencers. To this end, 15 EFL students in an…