The present study investigates the effects of two subsequent learning contexts, formal instruction (FI) at home and a 3-month stay abroad (SA), on vocabulary acquisition in English as a foreign language (EFL) writing and speaking. Data were collected from 30 Catalan/Spanish learners of English before and after each learning period using a written…

The teaching lab is an important component of training and developing undergraduate chemistry students. The lab provides a complex teaching environment where faculty address a number of student-centered goals, including the development of technical proficiency, demonstrations of theoretical concepts, promotion of teamwork, and modeling of data…

Mathematicians use example generation to test and verify mathematical ideas; however, the processes through which undergraduates learn to productively generate examples are not well understood. We engaged calculus students in a teaching experiment designed to develop skills in productively generating examples to learn novel concepts. This article…

We examine students' mathematical performance on quantitative "synthesis problems" with varying mathematical complexity. Synthesis problems are tasks comprising multiple concepts typically taught in different chapters. Mathematical performance refers to the formulation, combination, and simplification of equations. Generally speaking,…

In this article we will discuss, through the explanations given by teachers who teach Mathematics, the importance of using teaching strategies in the implementation of tasks. Teachers who participated in it belong to the group "Observatory Mathematics Education" (OME-Bahia). This study was framed in a qualitative approach and data were…

We report here on students' views of example generation tasks assigned to them in two first year undergraduate Calculus courses. The design and use of such tasks was undertaken as part of a project which aimed to afford students opportunities to develop their thinking skills and their conceptual understanding. In interviews with 10 students, we…

This study is part of a more extensive research project that addresses the understanding of the derivative concept in university students with prior instruction in differential calculus. In particular, we focus on the analysis of students' responses to a sequence of tasks that require a high level of understanding of the concept, and complement…

Comparisons of literary experts and novices indicate that experts engage in interpretive processes to "get the point" during their reading of literary texts but novices do not. In two studies the reading and interpretive processes of literary novices (undergraduates with no formal training in literature study) were elicited through…

Proving that a given set is indeed a subgroup, one needs to show that it is non-empty, and closed under operation and inverses. This study focuses on the first condition, analysing students' responses to this task. Results suggest that there are three distinct problematic responses: the total absence of proving this condition, the problematic…

This study aims to examine refusal strategies of Turkish learners of English and explore their perceptions of social factors that are influential in their strategy use. The study was conducted at a private university in the west of Turkey, and eighty Turkish L2 learners enrolled at an English language preparatory program participated in the study.…

The purpose of this study is to identify the occurrence of Sudden Moments of Inspiration (SMI) in the sketching process of industrial design through experiments to explain the effect of sub consciousness on SMI. There are a pre-experiment and a formal experiment. In the formal experiment, nine undergraduates majoring in industrial design with same…

Retrospective reports gathered from developmental education students as part of a learning assessment revealed the use of several strategies for writing a summary based on a text. Participants were selected for the study based on the richness and variety of their verbal descriptions of task performance in structured, individualized interviews.…

Units of measure are critical in many scientific fields. While instructors often note that students struggle with units, little research has been conducted about the nature and extent of these difficulties or why they exist. We investigated calculus students' unit use in area and volume computations. Seventy-three percent of students gave…

This case study aimed to explore best practice in applying task-based language teaching (TBLT) via a Web-conferencing tool, Blackboard Collaborate, in a beginners' online Chinese course by evaluating the pedagogical values and limitations of the software and the tasks designed. Chapelle's (2001) criteria for computer-assisted language learning…

The present study investigates the effects of two different vocabulary learning conditions in digital reading environments equipped with electronic textual glossing. The first condition presents the concordance lines of a target lexical item, thereby making learners infer its meaning by reading the referenced sentences. The second condition…