Previous research suggests that adolescents with learning disabilities (LD) are less accurate in predicting academic performance than normally achieving (NA) adolescents and display a tendency to overestimate their level of performance (e.g., Klassen, 2007). However, no studies have been conducted investigating whether this overestimation is…

Experimental studies of sentence production in Parkinson disease (PD) are rare. This study examined the relationship between cognitive abilities and performance on two sentence production tasks, sentence repetition, and sentence generation, in which complexity was manipulated. Thirty-eight older adults aged 60 to 85, half with PD, completed the…

The visual complexity of orthographies varies across writing systems. Prior research has shown that complexity strongly influences the initial stage of reading development: the perceptual learning of grapheme forms. This study presents a computational simulation that examines the degree to which visual complexity leads to grapheme learning…

Tasks provide engaging ways to involve learners in meaningful, real-world activities with the foreign language (FL). Yet selecting classroom tasks suitable to learners' linguistic readiness is challenging, and task-based research is exploring the relationship between learners' overall abilities (e.g., reading, grammatical) and the complexity and…

This study is an exploration of teachers' engagement with concepts embedded in the normal distribution. The participants were a group of 290 in-service teachers enrolled in a teacher development program. The research instrument was an assessment task that can be described as an "unknown percentage" problem, which required the application…

We examined geometric calculation with number tasks used within a unit of geometry instruction in a Taiwanese classroom, identifying the source of each task used in classroom instruction and analyzing the cognitive complexity of each task with respect to 2 distinct features: diagram complexity and problem-solving complexity. We found that…

One of the fundamental problems in language testing is the lack of adequate generalizability between what a test is measuring and what fulfills the learners' real world language use needs. It is important to recognize that no matter how precise a test measures a construct, if the way that a construct is defined and the way that test tasks are…

Communities, also called clusters or modules, are groups of nodes which probably share common properties and/or play similar roles within a graph. They widely exist in real networks such as biological, social, and information networks. Allowing users to interactively browse and explore the community structure, which is essential for understanding…

Stressful situations, the aversiveness of events, or increases in task difficulty (e.g., conflict) have repeatedly been shown to be capable of triggering attentional control adjustments. In the present study we tested whether the particularity of an fMRI testing environment (i.e., EPI noise) might result in such increases of the cognitive control…

Introduction: Two experiments tested the hypothesis that relative metacomprehension accuracy is vulnerable when readers' cognitive efforts are biased by text order. It is proposed that the difficulty level of initial text information biases readers' estimates of text comprehension but is correctable when more cognitive effort is applied. Method:…

Children's acquisition of tool use abilities is an important part of development but is not yet well understood. This study compares two modes of tool-use learning, observation and individual haptic experience. Two- and 3-year-olds had haptic experience with tools, observed tool use by others, had both haptic and observational experience, or no…

English has assumed a new role in international communication in recent decades, that is, as a Lingua Franca (ELF) among speakers with different first languages. This study attempts to investigate and analyze Chinese university students' perception and production of paired English fricatives from the perspective of ELF. By using a listening…

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 investigated the effects of a group of task factors on advanced English as a second language learners' actual and perceived listening performance. We examined whether the speed, linguistic complexity, and explicitness of the listening text along with characteristics of the text necessary for task completion influenced comprehension. We…

The use of diagrams in learning and communication is generally considered efficacious and an important skill to cultivate, especially among science students. At the same time, previous research has revealed many problems in student diagram use, including a lack of spontaneity in such use, but the extent to which these problems persist into the…