Since 1973, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has gathered information about student achievement in mathematics. Results of these periodic assessments, produced in print and web-based formats, provide valuable information to a wide variety of audiences. They inform citizens about the nature of students' comprehension of the…

Complex productivity applications that integrate tasks in the workplace are becoming more common. Usability typically focuses on short-term, immediate measures of task performance. This study incorporates a long-term goal of more durable learning, focusing on implicit learning (spontaneous, unplanned, usually unconscious learning as a result of…

How do children use physical and virtual tools to develop new numerical knowledge? While concrete instructional materials may support the delivery of novel information to learners, they may also over-simplify the task, unintentionally reducing learners' performance in recall and transfer tasks. This reduction in testing performance may be…

This investigation used an experimental design to examine how a visual imagery intervention and two levels of challenge would affect the flow experiences and performance of cadets engaged in Army ROTC marksmanship training. I employed MANCOVA analyses, with gender and prior marksmanship training experience as covariates, to assess cadets' (n =…

Increasingly, users are performing more sophisticated types of tasks, like information search, across computing platforms including desktops/laptops, tablets, and smartphones. While much research has been done to improve efficiency for each of these devices in the area of information search, few investigations have taken a pragmatic approach to…

Stressful situations, the aversiveness of events, or increases in task difficulty (e.g., conflict) have repeatedly been shown to be capable of triggering attentional control adjustments. In the present study we tested whether the particularity of an fMRI testing environment (i.e., EPI noise) might result in such increases of the cognitive control…

In this study we examined the effects of prior mathematics achievement and completion of a commercially developed, National Science Foundation-funded, or University of Chicago School Mathematics Project high school mathematics curriculum on achievement in students' first college statistics course. Specifically, we examined the relationship between…

Introduction: Two experiments tested the hypothesis that relative metacomprehension accuracy is vulnerable when readers' cognitive efforts are biased by text order. It is proposed that the difficulty level of initial text information biases readers' estimates of text comprehension but is correctable when more cognitive effort is applied. Method:…

Previous studies of children with language impairment (LI) reveal an insensitivity to aspect that may constitute part of the children's deficit. In this study, we examine aspect as well as tense in Hungarian-speaking children with LI. Twenty-one children with LI, 21 TD children matched for age, and 21 TD children matched for receptive vocabulary…

Children's acquisition of tool use abilities is an important part of development but is not yet well understood. This study compares two modes of tool-use learning, observation and individual haptic experience. Two- and 3-year-olds had haptic experience with tools, observed tool use by others, had both haptic and observational experience, or no…

The process of improving organizational performance through designing systemic interventions has remarkable similarities to designing instruction for improving learners' performance. Both processes deal with subjects (learners and organizations correspondingly) with certain capabilities that are exposed to novel information designed for producing…

This study investigates whether the experience of stuttering can result from the speaker's anticipation of his words being misrecognized. Twelve adults who stutter (AWS) repeated single words into what appeared to be an automatic speech-recognition system. Following each iteration of each word, participants provided a self-rating of whether they…

Purpose: With the global expansion of technology, our reading platform has shifted from traditional text to hypertext, yet little consideration has been given to how this shift might help or hinder students' reading comprehension. The purpose of this study was to compare reading comprehension of computer-based and paper-based texts in adolescents…

Spoken words have always been an important component of traditional instruction. With the development of modern educational technology tools, spoken text more often replaces or supplements written or on-screen textual representations. However, there could be a cognitive load cost involved in this trend, as spoken words can have both benefits and…

The aim of this study was to improve the criterion-related test score interpretation of a text-based assessment of scientific reasoning competencies in higher education by evaluating factors which systematically affect item difficulty. To provide evidence about the specific demands which test items of various difficulty make on pre-service…