The assumption that honors programs are more academically challenging is rarely interrogated. Using multi-institutional, longitudinal quantitative data from a larger study, we use quasi-experimental methods to examine students' experiences of course rigor, including workload and cognitive challenge, for honors participants compared to…

The imagination effect occurs when learners who imagine a procedure perform better on a subsequent test than learners who study it. The present study explored whether this effect is restricted to short-term learning or whether it also applies when learning is tested after a delay. Forty novices and forty experts learned about a basketball game…

Study skills are important for success in college. However, students may not be aware of or willing to use effective strategies such as spaced practice and self-testing. This replication-extension study of Susser and McCabe (Susser and McCabe in Instr Sci 41:345-363, 2013) supports their original findings regarding spaced practice and extends the…

The feelings of difficulty and familiarity (FOD and FOF) are two types of metacognitive experiences. Both may influence student engagement and the application of metacognitive strategies, but these relationships are not well understood, in part because many studies have relied on self-report measures of behaviors that may not accurately reflect…

Many test items use both an image and text, but present them in a spatially separate manner. This format could potentially cause a split-attention effect in which the test taker's cognitive load is increased by having to split attention between the image and text, while mentally integrating the two sources of information. We investigated the…

This study investigates how task complexity affects native speakers' and second language (L2) learners', and experts' perceptions of task difficulty in writing tasks. It also explores how task complexity influences English native speakers' and L2 learners' linguistic complexity in their writing. Ninety participants performed one simple and one…

Presenting information in a perceptually disfluent format sometimes enhances memory. Recent work examining 1 type of perceptual disfluency manipulation, Sans Forgetica typeface, has yielded discrepant findings; some studies find support for the idea that the disfluent typeface improves memory whereas others do not. The current study examined a…

This study investigated whether reading comprehension would differ when the texts are studied and tested on screen or on paper. Participants were 69 college students who were attending a college in midwestern United States. Participants read two expository texts each, under comparable paper and screen conditions and answered comprehension…

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…

Self-rated mental effort has been and continues to be the most widely used measure of cognitive load. This single-item measure is often used as a predictor variable in linear models for predicting performance or some other response variable. While an advantage of linear models is that they are fairly easy to understand, they fall short when the…

Although collaborative learning is becoming a widely popular instructional method, little research has been undertaken considering human cognitive structures and their influence on the design of collaborative learning tasks. Using cognitive load theory as a theoretical framework in this study, forty-five undergraduate students were assigned to…

Keystroke logging is used to automatically record writers' unfolding typing process and to get insight into moments when they struggle composing text. However, it is not clear which and how features from the keystroke log map to higher-level cognitive processes, such as planning and revision. This study aims to investigate the sensitivity of…

There are many paradigms available to address the unique and complex problems introduced with parallel programming. These complexities have implications for computer science education as ubiquitous multi-core computers drive the need for programmers to understand parallelism. One major obstacle to student learning of parallel programming is that…

Currently, the majority of e-learning lessons created and disseminated advocate a "one-size-fits-all" teaching philosophy. The e-learning environment, however, includes slow learners in a noticeable way, just like in traditional classroom settings. Learning analytics of educational data from a learning management system (LMS) have been…

Research was conducted with 10 low literate and 10 medium to high literate students at the University of Baltimore to understand how traditional literacy impacts search habits for new college freshman. Five low literate, non-student participants were included in the research as a control group for the two student populations. It was hypothesized…