This article reports on a study investigating how computational essays can be used to help students in higher education STEM take up disciplinary epistemic agency--cognitive control and responsibility over one's own learning within the scientific disciplines. Computational essays are a genre of scientific writing that combine live, executable…

This study compared the effects of worked example and scripting on students' argumentative peer feedback, essay and learning qualities. Participants were 80 BSc students who were randomly divided over 40 dyads and assigned to two experimental conditions (worked example and scripting). An online peer feedback environment named EduTech was designed…

Rating scales for writing assessment are critical in that they determine directly the quality and fairness of such performance tests. However, in many EFL contexts, rating scales are made, to certain extent, based on the intuition of teachers who strongly need a feasible and scientific route to guide their construction of rating scales. This study…

This study extended research on transformational service learning by examining the impact that a community placement context can have on college students' transformational processes. Kiely's "Transformational Service-Learning Process Model" was used as a framework to better understand how context, dissonance, and student reactions are…

Iyengar and Hood, both teacher consultants with the San Antonio Writing Project (SAWP), and instructors of an undergraduate society and social issues class, collaborated to enhance their undergraduate students' writing experiences using the National Writing Project model (Lieberman & Wood, 2003). Iyengar and Hood used strategies such as…

According to the model of constructive alignment, learners adjust their learning strategies to the announced assessment (backwash effect). Hence, when teaching for understanding, the assessment method should be aligned with this teaching goal to ensure that learners engage in corresponding learning strategies. A quasi-experimental field study with…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Astronomy Education Research.] This study investigates students' perceived impacts regarding their participation in course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) in astronomy. Each research experience adopted one or more projects from the Research Based Science Education for Undergraduates…

Our study examines the efficacy of Computer Assisted Scoring (CAS) of open-response text relative to expert human scoring within the complex domain of evolutionary biology. Specifically, we explored whether CAS can diagnose the explanatory elements (or Key Concepts) that comprise undergraduate students' explanatory models of natural selection with…

The study reports on implementing self-developed English for specific purposes (ESP) courseware for technology industries in an elective course, "English reading for technology," offered to junior students of English as a foreign language in a technical university in southern Taiwan. Courseware implementation was combined with a…

The aim of this article is to present a methodological model to analyze students' group interaction to improve their essays in online learning environments, based on asynchronous and written communication. In these environments teacher and student scaffolds for discussion are essential to promote interaction. One of these scaffolds can be the…

Two experiments were conducted to examine whether students use arguments with refutation in one text for evaluating the opposite arguments without refutation in another text. Undergraduate students read two conflicting texts in either of the two orders: pro arguments text first and con arguments text first. After reading each text, they evaluated…

I conducted this study to provide insights toward deepening understanding of association between culture and writing by building, assessing, and refining a conceptual model of second language writing. To do this, I examined culture and coherence as well as the relationship between them through a mixed methods research design. Coherence has been an…

A theoretically based structure-mapping model of writing from sources was proposed and tested with 34 male and 50 female undergraduates who wrote a comparison-contrast essay about 2 passages. Results suggest that the model, adapted from work of D. Gentner, is useful in describing use of sources in writing. (SLD)

The critical thinker is one who is, according to Harvey Siegel, "appropriately moved by reasons." This characterization of critical thinking combines a "reason assessment" component (the principled assessment of reasons and their ability to warrant beliefs, claims and actions) and a "critical attitude" component (the…

How lecture note taking influences writing processes was studied in 4 experiments involving 392 undergraduates. The writing model of L. S. Flower and J. R. Hayes (1981) served as theoretical foundation. Results support the effects of external storage and encoding plus internal storage on writing processes. (SLD)