This study examined the effects of adjusting the difficulty level of instructional materials on the on-task time and comprehension of four students with emotional and behavioral disorders. All participants previously exhibited low rates of on-task behavior during reading assignments. Students were presented with reading materials at their…

The concepts of optimal foraging theory and the marginal value theorem are used to investigate possible student behaviour in accruing marks in various forms of assessment. The ideas of predator energy consumption, handling and search times can be evaluated in terms of student behaviour and gaining marks or "attainment". These ideas can…

Understanding how students translate between mathematical representations is of both practical and theoretical importance. This study examined students' processes in their generation of symbolic and graphic representations of given polynomial functions. The purpose was to investigate how students perform these translations. The result of the study…

This study investigates problem-solving difficulties of novices in a classroom setting, using a German instructional tool, the Fischertechnik kit of approximately 400 parts. In order to analyse the students' thinking processes as they solved the problems, verbal protocol analysis (VPA) was used to record the students'' thinking processes and…

This study used traditional behavioral assessment procedures (functional behavioral assessment and structural analysis) in a single-subject design to determine whether a functional relationship existed between (a) levels of task difficulty and teacher attention and (b) off-task behavior in 3 students identified as highly able in mathematics who…

As a great deal of importance is now placed on student engagement, it is just as imperative to establish the soundness of constructs underlying those survey instruments and benchmarks used in providing indicators of such. This study investigates the dimensionalities of student engagement among community college students as measured by the…

Examination of the effects of difficulty level of academic tasks on the behavior of 2 subjects (ages 9 and 12) with severe behavior disorders found that difficult tasks were generally associated with lower percentages of time-on-task and higher percentages of time engaged in disruptive behavior than were easy task conditions. (Author/DB)

This study examined the effects of increasing task difficulty when inadequately challenging tasks are assigned. Jason, a 10-year-old, typically developing Caucasian boy, attended a fourth-grade general education classroom at a public elementary school. During independent academic assignments in math and reading, Jason often talked with other…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether students expected course difficulty to be reflected in grade distributions and in the amount of out-of-class effort required for success. Students from both upper and lower division classes described the amount of time they expected to spend preparing for an easy class, a difficult class, and a…

A study of beginning college Spanish students' time-on-task in the foreign language classroom is reported. First, appropriate student on-task behaviors were determined, and teacher behaviors influencing or associated with student on-task behavior were defined. An observational instrument for recording and correlating student and teacher behaviors…