This study aims to investigate the effects of warm up tasks as classroom activities on foreign language written production. For showing these effects, sixty out of one hundred forty Iranian sophomore EFL students from the Islamic Azad University of Lahijan branch, Iran were selected after following the Oxford Placement Test (OPT). Then, they were…

This study compares the effects of two different self-assessment tools--rubrics and scripts--on self-regulation, learning and self-efficacy in interaction with two other independent variables (type of instructions and feedback). A total of 120 secondary school students analyzed landscapes--a usual task when studying Geography--in one of twelve…

Sentence position and word length have been claimed to contribute to the perceptual salience of words. The perceptual salience of words in turn is said to predict L2 developmental sequences. Data for such claims come from sentence repetition tasks that required perceptual re-encoding of input and that did not control for focal accent. We used a…

Executive functions play an important role in cognitive development, and during the preschool years especially, children's performance is limited in tasks that demand flexibility in their behavior. We asked whether preschoolers would exhibit limitations when they are required to apply a general rule in the context of novel stimuli on every trial…

Numerous studies have shown that spreadsheets used in companies often have errors which may affect the quality of the decisions made with these tools. Many businesses are unaware or choose to ignore the risks associated with spreadsheet use. The intent of this study was to learn more about the characteristics of spreadsheet end user developers,…

The perception of time is heavily influenced by attention and memory, both of which change over the lifespan. In the current study, children (8 yrs), young adults (18-25 yrs), and older adults (60-75 yrs) were tested on a duration bisection procedure using 3 and 6-s auditory and visual signals as anchor durations. During test, participants were…

This study evaluated the influence of the frequency of reading and writing habits (RWH) associated with education on the performance of adults in brief neuropsychological tasks. A sample of 489 Brazilian subjects, composed of 71% women, aged 21-80 years, with 2-23 years of formal education, was evaluated by the Brazilian Brief Neuropsychological…

Theory suggests that the vision-for-perception and vision-for-action processing streams operate under very different temporal constraints (Glover, 2004; Goodale, Jackobson, & Keillor, 1994; Graham, Bradshaw, & Davis, 1998; Hu, Eagleson, & Goodale, 1999). With the present study, children and young adults were asked to estimate how far a cued target…

In a multi-study naturalistic quasi-experiment involving 269 students in a semester-long introductory philosophy course, we investigated the effect of teaching argument diagramming (AD) on students' scores on argument analysis tasks. An argument diagram is a visual representation of the content and structure of an argument. In each study, all of…

In 4 experiments, we intermixed trials in which the stimulus color was relevant with trials where participants had to judge the stimulus shape or parity and found that the logical-recoding rule (Hedge & Marsh, 1975) applied to the relevant dimension in a task can generalize to the irrelevant dimension of the other task. The mapping…

Two experiments investigated how absolute and relative distance shape adults' and young children's ratings concerning the extent to which the term "by" describes the relation between locations. Three- and 4-year-old children and adults were asked to rate how well the word "by" described the relation between several blocks and a landmark. The…

Three experiments examined memory-based guidance of visual search using a modified version of the contextual-cueing paradigm (Jiang & Chun, 2001). The target, if present, was a conjunction of color and orientation, with target (and distractor) features randomly varying across trials (multiconjunction search). Under these conditions, reaction times…

Relations between measures of creative potential and different scoring methods were examined in 154 French schoolchildren. The "Test for Creative Thinking-Drawing Production" (TCT-DP), parallel lines task from the "Torrance Test for Creative Thinking," and an object-based creative drawing task were used. Factor analysis of…

Lexical development is a key facet of later language development. To characterize the linguistic knowledge of school age children, performance in the written modality must also be considered. This study tracks the growth of written text-embedded lexicon in Catalan-speaking children and adolescents. Participants (N = 2161), aged from 5 to 16 years…

College English in China has shifted from cultivating reading ability to comprehensive communicative abilities with an emphasis on listening and speaking. For this reason, new teaching models should be built on modern information technology. However, little research on developing models for the online teaching of listening skills has been…