Scaffolding is a complicated construct that can take many forms, including both written and verbal forms. This research study focused on three elementary science classrooms where students were using a series of written scaffolds to guide explanation building. In each classroom, data were collected to document and study an additional type of…

Educators aspire to use the most effective teaching materials possible. Their choices, ideally, should be informed by empirical evidence on how materials they use can affect students' outcomes or performance, particularly their post-instruction performance or application. The current research tested the extent to which voice (active vs. passive)…

In the typical loaded verbal working memory (WM) span task (e.g., Daneman & Carpenter, 1980), participants judge the veridicality of a series of sentences while simultaneously storing the sentence final word for later recall. Performance declines as the number of sentences is increased; aging exacerbates this decline. The present study examined…

We investigated instruction of independent creation of picture activity schedules (PASs) and how four middle school students with intellectual disability used them to complete tasks independently. A withdrawal design (A-BC-B-A-B) was used to evaluate whether the intervention had an effect on the dependent variable and to test for generalization to…

Science classroom discourse is inherently multimodal in that scientific meanings are made through an integration of multiple semiotic systems (e.g., language, diagrams, equations). Although some studies have described this multimodal nature, few have examined and explained the relationship between the integration of multiple semiotic systems and…

Typically developing toddlers accurately follow an adult's gaze learn object labels. However, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) mis-map new words to their own focus of attention. Children with ASD and typical development participated in three word learning conditions. In the follow-in condition, the adult labeled an object which was…

Motor affordances have been shown to play a role in visual object identification and categorization. The present study explored whether working memory is likewise supported by motor affordances. Use of motor affordances should be disrupted by motor interference, and this effect should be larger for objects that have motor affordances than for…

Transformational leadership and immediacy behaviors within educational contexts have received a great deal of attention from researchers in the past few decades. Generally, the literature has focused on the impact of instructor transformational behaviors and instructor immediacy behaviors on educational outcomes. However, the relationship between…

A common practice in colleges and universities throughout the United States is to make verbal communication and class participation a requirement for academic success. However, for some students this type of verbal communication in the classroom can produce physical and emotional anxiety that can profoundly affect their ability to succeed in the…

It has been suggested that individuals with autism will be less responsive to the emotional content of music than typical individuals. With the aim of testing this hypothesis, a group of high-functioning adults on the autism spectrum was compared with a group of matched controls on two measures of emotional responsiveness to music, comprising…

The present study is intended to critically examine metadiscourse markers in 24 master thesis abstracts. Twelve of them are written by non-native Iraqi female students and the rest by native American female students. To do so, the researchers have set two aims: examining the types and subtypes of metadiscourse markers in terms of nativity and…

In a seminal study Simcock and Hayne (2002) showed that 3-year-olds were unable to use newly acquired words to describe a "magic" event experienced 6 or 12 months earlier. In the reference study the children's verbal recall was tested without props being present. Inspired by recent evidence, the original design was replicated, testing…

This study investigated the contribution of verbal working memory to the oral and written story production of deaf children. Participants were 29 severely to profoundly deaf children aged 8-13 years and 29 hearing controls, matched for grade level. The children narrated a picture story orally and in writing and performed a reading comprehension…

This paper analyses introductory statistics students' verbal and gestural expressions as they interacted with a dynamic sketch (DS) designed using "Sketchpad" software. The DS involved numeric data points built on the number line whose values changed as the points were dragged along the number line. The study is framed on aggregate…

Energy is an abstract science concept, so the ways that we think and talk about energy rely heavily on ontological metaphors: metaphors for what kind of thing energy is. Two commonly used ontological metaphors for energy are "energy as a substance" and "energy as a vertical location." Our previous work has demonstrated that…