This study examined the impact of e-book text-tracking design on 4th graders' (10-year-old children's) learning of Chinese characters. The e-books used in this study were created with Adobe Flash CS 5.5 and Action Script 3.0. This study was guided by two main questions: (1) Is there any difference in learning achievement (Chinese character…

How do students from privileged communities respond to educational efforts encouraging them to become justice-oriented citizens? Observational and interview data collected during a semester-long case study of eleven high school students in a social studies class at an elite private school reveal four markedly different interpretations of their…

This study examines the academic experiences of heritage Spanish-speakers who were placed in a traditional Spanish class for non-Spanish speakers at the secondary level. Each of the participants in the study demonstrated advanced-levels of oral proficiency in Spanish yet each was placed in a beginning-level Spanish class. An ethnographic case…

The Taiwanese early intervention/early childhood special education (EI/ECSE) system is modeled after the federal legislation and practices of the U.S., incorporating specific cultural beliefs in Taiwan. Nonetheless, in EI/ECSE assessments, several challenges are presented, including: (a) limited resources and funding, (b) lack of reliable and…

This dissertation presents several studies designed to probe the mental representations that physics experts and novices form when interacting with typical instructional materials, such as diagrams and problem statements. By using recognition tasks and a change detection task, the mental representations of experts and novices are studied in a more…

In this article the authors set out to examine the effect of tracking in mathematics. Previous analyses have shown it to be quite prevalent at 8th grade unlike much of the rest of the world. The US practices both between- and within-school tracking, leading to very different content coverage for different students. Without judging the merits of…

Morphological Analysis as a vocabulary acquisition strategy has both its advocates and antagonists. Criticism from opponents is often warranted when programs omit one or more of the three critical criteria that establish the framework behind a successful curriculum. The intent behind this paper is to disseminate and explicate these three criteria,…

The current study investigated the effects of different external representational formats on learning combinatorics and probability theory in an inquiry based learning environment. Five conditions were compared in a pre-test post-test design: three conditions each using a single external representational format (Diagram, Arithmetic, or Text), and…

Analogies are known to foster concept learning, whereas discovery learning is effective for transfer. By combining discovery learning and analogies or similarities of concepts, attractive new arrangements emerge, but do they maintain both concept and transfer effects? Unfortunately, there is a lack of data confirming such combined effectiveness.…

Adventure therapy (AT) and the use of activities and outdoor experiences for educational and therapeutic purposes have a long and rich history. In recent years, the popularity and use of adventure programs in schools, clinical treatment facilities, and various other settings has increased. This increased use of AT in a therapeutic context has…

There is a long standing debate between aphasiologists on the essential factor that constitutes the behavioral patterns of loss and preservation in agrammatic Broca's aphasia. It has been suggested that linguistic complexity plays a crucial role: linguistically complex structures are more difficult to produce than linguistically simple ones.…

Within the cognitive load theory framework, we designed and compared three alternative instructional solution formats that can be derived from a common static hierarchical network representation depicting problem structure. The interactive-solution format permitted students to search in self-controlled manner for solution steps, static-solution…

As the largest international study ever taken in history, the Trend in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) has been held as a benchmark to measure U.S. student performance in the global context. In-depth analyses of the TIMSS project are conducted in this study to examine key issues of the comparative investigation: (1) item flaws in mathematics…

The challenge inherent in cross-national research of providing instruments in different languages measuring the same construct is well known. But even instruments in a single language may be biased towards certain countries or regions due to local linguistic specificities. Consequently, it may be appropriate to use different versions of an…

Letter-name identification has been widely used as part of early screening to identify children who might be at risk for future word reading difficulty. The goal of the present study was to examine whether a reduced set of letters could have similar diagnostic accuracy rather than a full set (i.e., 26 letters) when used as a screen. First, we…