Many students, especially English language learners (ELLs), struggle with writing expository texts. This study examined the impact of several writing strategies on ELLs' writing skills, including prewriting strategies and scaffolding strategies inherent in the Thinking Maps (TM) program. The purpose of the study was to see if ELLs were able to use…

Chronic victimisation in adolescence is a traumatic experience with potential negative long-term health consequences. Given that victimisation has been shown to increase over the transition from primary to secondary school, longitudinal data from 1810 students transitioning from primary to secondary school were used to identify victimisation…

The present study aimed to determine the compensation strategies used by Iranian elementary EFL learners across the speaking skill. The participants of this study were a sample of 120 EFL elementary male and female learners whose ages ranged between 11 and 25 at a language institute in Rostam, Iran. The main participants were homogenized through…

With over 800 million users worldwide, the global importance of Facebook as a social-networking platform is beyond doubt. This popularity, particularly among university-students, has encouraged research to explore ways in which social networking can be adapted into virtual learning environments. In particular, this study uses the think-aloud…

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to understand how general education teachers perceive their experiences working with students in their classrooms who have been diagnosed with autism. The study addressed the following research question: How do secondary school general educators perceive their experiences working with students in…

This research reports a two-phase descriptive study of young children's engagement with ebooks conducted in Head Start classrooms. Phase 1 focused on the development of a typology as an analytic framework for observing engagement with ebooks in different formats (shared book; independent book browsing) and across devices (stationary touch screen;…

Students' writing can provide better insight into their thinking than can multiple-choice questions. However, resource constraints often prevent faculty from using writing assessments in large undergraduate science courses. We investigated the use of computer software to analyze student writing and to uncover student ideas about chemistry in an…

The purpose of this study was to determine if teachers who developed lessons based on Bloom's Taxonomy and the "Virginia Standards of Learning Curriculum Framework" saw increased scores on the mathematics benchmark assessment for fourth grade. Two classes taught by different mathematics teachers participated. The mean of the posttest…

Background: Interest among social scientists in peer influences has grown with recent resegregation of the nation's schools and court decisions that limit the ability of school districts to consider race in school assignment decisions. If having more advantaged peers is beneficial, then these trends may reduce educational equity. Previous studies…

A contrast category effect on categorization occurs when the decision to apply a category term to an entity not only involves a comparison between the entity and the target category but is also influenced by a comparison of the entity with 1 or more alternative categories from the same domain as the target. Establishing a contrast category effect…

Cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs) attempt to uncover latent skills or attributes that examinees must possess in order to answer test items correctly. The DINA (deterministic input, noisy "and") model is a popular CDM that has been widely used. It is shown here that a logistic version of the model can easily be fit with standard software for…

The purpose of the study was to explore the effectiveness of a brief, feasible, and cost-effective universal screener for kindergarten readiness. The study examined whether teacher ratings of kindergarteners' academic, behavioral, and overall readiness at the beginning of the year were predictive of academic, emotional, and behavioral outcomes at…

The use of criterion group validation is hindered by the difficulty of classifying individuals on latent constructs. Latent class analysis (LCA) is a method that can be used for determining the validity of scales meant to assess latent constructs without such a priori classifications. The authors used this method to examine the ability of the L…

Building on previous studies of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) on SLA, and principled criteria for confirming its existence in L2 data, an empirical study was run on 74 Arab learners of English (ALEs). A detailed analysis was made of interlanguage stages of the simple past tense forms in 222 written texts produced by ALEs in the classroom…

Scope and Method of Study: An educational philosophy and teaching style provide a foundation for understanding and for guiding guide decisions about curriculum, teacher-learner relationship and professional practice. The purpose of this descriptive quantitative study was to describe the educational philosophies and teaching styles of the teacher…