Studies on reasons accounting for the difficulties in learning public administration is relatively new in the public administration literature though many findings exist regarding students' difficulties in the study of different subject areas. This paper examines whether the perceived reasons in other subjects are real in the study of public…

Background: This study examines the effect of test anxiety on the academic performance of postgraduate female students, focusing on their perceptions and experiences in open-book exams (OBE) and closed-book exams (CBE). Method: A qualitative case study design was employed using the Thinking Aloud Protocol (TAP) to collect data from five Saudi…

This study examined the relationship of linguistic complexity, captured using a set of lexical richness, syntactic complexity, and discoursal complexity indices, to second language (L2) learners' perception of text difficulty, captured using L2 raters' comparative judgment on text comprehensibility and reading speed. Testing materials were 180…

The purpose of this study was to examine the use and cognitive load associated with Open Educational Resources (OERS) and Affordable Digital Textbook (ADT) among prelicensure Baccalaureate of Nursing students in an asynchronous on-line health policy course. OERS and ADT provide low student cost curriculum options for nursing faculty. The…

In today's university era, reforming the English teaching model has become a major research topic for researchers. Based on this, this paper adopts a hierarchical and progressive model construction method to further explore the reform model of university English teaching in the context of educational ecology. First, this paper discusses the…

Companies produce increasing numbers of textbooks in electronic format (e-textbooks) for use by students and instructors. One would be remiss, however, to think that university bookstores are not filled with hard copies of textbooks; many students and instructors still insist on using traditional paper copy textbooks. Many models exist to explain…

This study addresses how Chinese learners of English as a second language (L2) perceive conversations in English materials as compared to speakers of English as a first language (L1). Data were collected through questionnaires completed by 48 participants (28 L2 English learners in China and 20 L1 English speakers in the UK), eliciting evaluations…

e-Textbooks and e-learning technologies have become ubiquitous in college and university courses as faculty seek out ways to provide more engaging, flexible and customizable learning opportunities for students. However, the same technologies that support learning can serve as a source of frustration. Research on frustration with technology is…

Many geoscience phenomena cannot be perceived at human temporal or spatial scales. As a consequence, we can only understand many processes that drive geological phenomena through analogical reasoning. Building deep conceptual understanding requires instruction that activates the appropriate source analogs and allows students to build useful…

In the current study we examined students' course performance, perceptions, and self-reported use of an open textbook compared to a traditional publisher's textbook in an introductory psychology course. Sixty students from two course sections used either an open textbook or a traditional textbook. To minimize the effect of confounding variables,…

The aim of this study is to evaluate the listening texts in terms of the suitability for student level. In order to achieve this goal, the opinions of Turkish teachers and the secondary school students who have been taught by these teachers were studied. The research was carried out in January 2018 with 5 Turkish teachers and 20 secondary school…

This research addressed Hungarian pre-service and in-service (both elementary and lower secondary) teachers' pedagogical content knowledge concerning the teaching of word problem solving strategies. By means of a standardized interview protocol, participants (N = 30) were asked about their judgement on the difficulty of teaching word problems, the…

The purpose of this qualitative research was to explore (a) how graduate students interpret their experiences with the use of e-books for learning, (b) which reasons influence their preference for e-books or printed books when they learn, (c) how they perceive the impact e-books have on their learning, and (d) how they compare learning experiences…

Applying artificial intelligence (AI) to support science learning is a prominent aspect of the digital education revolution. This study investigates students' interaction and learning with an AI book, which enables the inputting of questions and receiving of suggested questions to understand biology, in comparison with a traditional E-book.…

Two groups of freshman students, enrolled in a Vocabulary I and Reading I courses, participated in the study. Before instruction, both groups took a recognition (vocabulary) and a production (oral reading) pre-test. Comparisons of the pre-test scores showed no significant differences between the experimental and control group in decoding skills…