E. Dhooge and R. J. Hartsuiker (2010) reported experiments showing that picture naming takes longer with low- than high-frequency distractor words, replicating M. Miozzo and A. Caramazza (2003). In addition, they showed that this distractor-frequency effect disappears when distractors are masked or preexposed. These findings were taken to refute…

Based on a case study of Ghanaian cocoa farmers who attended farmer field schools (FFS), this paper explores the impact of the FFS methodology on farmers' technical knowledge, experimentation, knowledge diffusion, group formation and social skills as a way of assessing whether the relatively high costs associated with the method is justified. We…

Two experiments examined 4- to 11-year-olds' and adults' performance (N = 350) on two variants of a Stroop-like card task: the "day-night task" (say "day" when shown a moon and "night" when shown a sun) and a new "happy-sad task" (say "happy" for a sad face and "sad" for a happy face). Experiment 1 featured colored cartoon drawings. In Experiment…

Audiovisual design might impact emotional responses, as studies from the 1970s and 1980s on movie and television content show. Given today's abundant presence of web-based videos, this study investigates whether audiovisual design will impact web-video content in a similar way. The study is motivated by the potential influence of video-evoked…

Partial discharge (PD) monitoring is an effective predictive maintenance tool for electrical power equipment. As a result, an understanding of the theory related to PD and the associated measurement techniques is now necessary knowledge for power engineers in their professional life. This paper presents a modular course on PD phenomenon in which…

We report two sets of experiments showing that the large individual variability in language learning success in adults can be attributed to neurophysiological, neuroanatomical, cognitive, and perceptual factors. In the first set of experiments, native English-speaking adults learned to incorporate lexically meaningfully pitch patterns in words. We…

Despite the importance of teacher efficacy, there has been little research on the effects of interventions intended to increase it. Thus, the present study considered the potential of Professional Development (PD) in enhancing teachers' beliefs about their teaching ability. The study was quantitative in nature and utilized the reliable survey…

Working with evidence is a fundamental part of scientific enquiry. Children should be taught to consider evidence and evaluate it. They should make simple comparisons, comparing what happened with what they expected to happen, and try to explain what happened through drawing on their knowledge and understanding. In this article, the author…

Reflection plays an important role in improving learning performance. This study, therefore, attempted to explore whether learners' reflection levels can be improved if teaching strategies are adapted to fit with learners' thinking styles in an online learning environment. Three teaching strategies, namely constructive, guiding, and inductive,…

This article focuses on the learning that is enabled while a primary school child makes a story using multimodal software. This child is diagnosed with autism. The aim is to use a cultural-historical framework to carry out an in-depth analysis of a process of learning with action as a unit of analysis. The article is based on a collaborative…

Research on retrieval-induced forgetting has shown that retrieval can cause the forgetting of related or competing items in memory (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994). In the present research, we examined whether an analogous phenomenon occurs in the context of creative problem solving. Using the Remote Associates Test (RAT; Mednick, 1962), we…

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

A substantial number of upper-level science students and practicing physical science teachers demonstrate confusion about thermal equilibrium, heat transfer, heat capacity, and specific heat capacity. The traditional method of instruction, which involves learning the related definitions and equations, using equations to solve heat transfer…

Through this study the authors investigated undergraduate students' memory recall in three media environments with three note-taking options, following an A x B design with nine experiments. The three environments included no-distraction, auditory-distraction, and auditory-visual-distraction; while the three note-taking options included…

The progress registered in the use of video games as educational tools has not yet been successfully transferred to the classroom. In an attempt to close this gap, a framework was developed that assists in the design and classroom integration of educational games. The framework addresses both the educational dimension and the ludic dimension. The…