Literacy skills are important for accessing all areas of academic content as well as for increasing quality of life. The use of shared stories to teach early literacy skills to students with extensive support needs, including students with autism, is an evidence-based practice. This project extends the research by examining the effects of…

In this paper the development of mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) over the past 20 years is reviewed with a particular focus on the pedagogical challenges facing its exploitation. Following a consideration of the definition of mobile learning, the paper describes the dominant mobile technologies upon which MALL applications have been…

The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) lays strong emphasis on task-based language teaching (TBLT). However, this approach constitutes a challenge for many foreign language teachers, not so much because they are not familiar with the approach or its benefits, but because of the requirements and practical conditions to be met. Most…

Cognitive task analysis (CTA) is methodology for eliciting knowledge from subject matter experts. CTA has been used to capture the cognitive processes, decision-making, and judgments that underlie expert behaviors. A review of the literature revealed that CTA has not yet been used to capture the knowledge required to perform ultrasound guided…

We have analyzed circa 180 navigation paths followed by six learners while they performed three language encoding tasks at the computer using an online dictionary prototype. Our hypothesis was that learners who follow an "optimal path" while navigating within the dictionary, using its search and look-up functions, would have a high chance of…

This exploratory study described the experiences of choice in physical activity contexts for adults with mobility impairments. The experiences of 3 female and 2 males with mobility impairments between 18 and 23 years of age were described using the interpretive phenomenological methods of individual interviews, written stories, and field notes.…

Recent research indicates that toddlers and infants succeed at various "non-verbal" spontaneous-response false-belief tasks; here we asked whether toddlers would also succeed at verbal spontaneous-response false-belief tasks that imposed significant linguistic demands. We tested 2.5-year-olds using two novel tasks: a "preferential-looking" task in…

In motor learning, a popular area of research has been to examine the importance of where individuals focus their attention during the acquisition of motor skills. Researchers in this area have proposed that, when teaching a motor skill, the instructions used to direct the learner's attention can affect the immediate and long-term retention of…

Three experiments with 88 college-aged participants explored how unlabeled experiences--learning episodes in which people encounter objects without information about their category membership--influence beliefs about category structure. Participants performed a simple one-dimensional categorization task in a brief supervised learning phase, then…

Traditionally, the first mathematical task for primary grade students to master is addition. Mastering addition facts is truly a positive experience. Then one turns to subtraction. After mastering addition facts, many students think that subtraction facts are a whole new set of facts to learn that have nothing to do with addition facts. They do…

We investigated infants' response to pedagogy in the domain of tool use. In experiment 1, infants viewed a causally relevant tool-use demonstration presented identically in either a social/pedagogical or social/non-pedagogical context. Infants exposed to pedagogical cues displayed superior production of the tool-use sequence. This was so despite…

The kite design activity described in this article is "hands-on" and provides students the opportunity to learn and apply STEM concepts in the process of building and flying a traditional diamond-shaped bowed kite from scratch. Important components of the activity are that students read and follow instructions and lessons about the…

The purpose of this article is to analyze a task included in the LINC Home Study (LHS) program. LHS is a federally funded distance education program offered to newcomers to Canada who are unable to attend regular LINC classes. A task, in which a language structure (a gerund) is chosen and analyzed, was selected from one instructional module of LHS…

This study examines the lexical representation and recall of abstract words by beginning L2 learners of Spanish in the light of the predictions of the dual coding theory (Paivio 1971; Paivio and Desrochers 1980). Ninety-seven learners (forty-four males and fifty-three females) were randomly placed in the picture or non-picture group and taught…

This study examined the effects of tasks, with varying levels of complexity, i.e. simple, + complex and ++ complex tasks on EFL learners' oral production in a multimedia task-based language teaching environment. 57 EFL adult learners carried out a total of 12 tasks, in sets of four tasks within three different themes and different levels of…