A frequent concern about constructivist instruction is that it works well, mainly for students with higher domain knowledge. We present findings from a set of two quasi-experimental pretest-intervention-posttest studies investigating the relationship between prior math achievement and learning in the context of a specific type of constructivist…

The aim of this research is to determine the strategies used by the 8th grade Turkish teachers in the teaching-learning process of the Turkish lesson for teaching comprehension (reading). The model of the research is the case study model, which is one of the qualitative research methods. The participants of the research are five Turkish teachers…

In computer-supported collaborative learning research, studies examining the combined effects of individual level, group level and within-group differences level measures on individual achievement are scarce. The current study addressed this by examining whether individual, group and within-group differences regarding engagement and prior…

Reading comprehension is the goal of reading, and making inferences is vital. Authors usually expect readers to make multiple types of inferences, including anaphoric, background knowledge, predictive, and retrospective. Common core assessments include all of these, yet instructional materials focus mostly on only one type, retrospective. This…

Research Findings: This study investigated teachers' Concept development (CD) strategy use in whole-group math teaching and its associations with children's higher-order thinking processes in 25 Chinese preschool math lessons. We utilized the CD dimension within the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) to guide our exploration. CD…

The goal of the paper is to understand to what degree the student success depends on teaching practices and materials, and to what degree it is due to differences in background, including prior knowledge, skills, preparation, abilities, etc. We analyzed the existing research on outcomes of the SAT and ACT in the United States and the Unified…

The current quantitative study, a naturalistic field experiment, was conducted in a public primary school in Soweto, Johannesburg, with the objective to examine how children's achievement on four assessments at the beginning of Grade R, namely their numeracy, their mathematics-specific vocabulary, their executive functions, and their logical…

This mixed-method study aims to investigate learners' perceptions of transactional distance and the association of those perceptions with learner outcomes in an online English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. Transactional distance theory formed the theoretical basis of the study. The quantitative data were collected from the learners enrolled…

Anticipation Guides (AGs) help learners to activate prior knowledge before an instructional unit. As a pre-learning strategy, AGs motivate learners to explore learning materials by challenging, activating, or corroborating their prior knowledge and predictions about a subject. While AGs have mostly been used in reading instruction, in this study,…

Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (BKT) is a commonly used approach for student modeling, and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) is a versatile model that can be applied to a wide range of tasks, such as language translation. In this work, we directly compared three models: BKT, its variant Intervention-BKT (IBKT), and LSTM, on two types of student modeling…

A common drawback in traditional language education is that all students in the same class use the same content. Since students may have different backgrounds such as prior knowledge and learning speed, one single curriculum may not be able to accommodate every student. Unfortunately, most students cannot afford personalized language learning,…

Vocabulary researchers generally point out three strategies that learners apply in order to find out the meanings of unknown words on their own (Graves, 2006; 2007). The use of context, word parts, reference materials ((e.g. dictionaries, glossaries, thesauruses, both print and online) in-text definition/explanations, synonyms, examples,…

Over the past few decades, many studies conducted in the field of learning science have described that scaffolding plays an important role in human learning. To scaffold a learner efficiently, a teacher should predict how much support a learner must have to complete tasks and then decide the optimal degree of assistance to support the learner's…

In this paper, we propose a computational approach to model the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) using predicted probabilities of correctness and engaging students in reflective dialogue. To that end, we employ a predictive model that uses a linear function of a variety of parameters, including difficulty and student knowledge and we analyze the…

In this paper, we propose a computational approach to modeling the Zone of Proximal Development of students who learn using a natural language tutoring system for physics. We employ a student model that predicts students' performance based on their prior knowledge and their activity when using a dialogue tutor to practice with conceptual,…