Twenty-one convenience sample student volunteers aged between 14-15 years worked in pairs (and one group of three) with two randomly allocated high quality conceptual (molecular level) and operational (mimicking wet labs) simulations. The volunteers were told they had five minutes to play, repeat, review, restart or stop the simulation, which in…

A new neuroscience twist on a classic psychology study offers some clues to what makes one student able to buckle down for hours of homework before a test while his classmates party. The study published in the September 2011 edition of "Proceedings of the National Academy of Science," suggests environmental cues may "hijack" the brain's mechanisms…

Although evidence-based practices (EBPs) for educating children with autism, such as pivotal response training (PRT), exist, teachers often lack adequate training to use these practices. The current investigation examined the efficacy of a 6-hour group workshop plus individual coaching for training 20 teachers to use PRT. Results indicate that the…

Incongruity between a positive statement and a negative context is a cue to verbal irony. Two studies examined whether school-age children and adults recognized that listeners require knowledge of context to detect irony. Specifically, the studies investigated whether participants could inhibit their own context knowledge to appropriately gauge…

Emotional prosody provides important cues for understanding the emotions of others in every day communication. Asperger's syndrome (AS) is a developmental disorder characterised by pronounced deficits in socio-emotional communication, including difficulties in the domain of prosody processing. We measured pupillary responses as an index of…

Previous research has suggested that very young children learning English adhere quite rigidly to a grammatical constraint on the possible contexts for contraction of "want" and "to" into the reduced form "wanna". Two elicited production studies reported here suggest that young children do produce "wanna" in illicit contexts. One study identifies…

Our spelling training software recodes words into multisensory representations comprising visual and auditory codes. These codes represent information about letters and syllables of a word. An enhanced version, developed for this study, contains an additional phonological code and an improved word selection controller relying on a phoneme-based…

Cross-linguistic findings have shown that Danish children's early receptive vocabulary development is slower relative to children learning other languages. In this study, we examined whether Danish children's acquisition of inflectional past-tense morphology is delayed relative to Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish children. Our comparison of data…

Unsworth and Engle (2007) recently proposed a model of working memory capacity characterized by, among other things, the ability to conduct a strategic, cue-dependent search of long-term memory. Although this ability has been found to mediate individual variation in a number of higher order cognitive tasks, the component processes involved remain…

The experience of daydreaming is familiar to all, yet daydreaming and its correlates in an educational context have yet to be adequately explored. This study investigated academic and other potential correlates of task-unrelated images and thoughts (TUITs) during lectures. 463 undergraduate psychology students participated across three lecture…

The authors investigated whether the amount of instructional guidance affects science learning and self-efficacy. Sixty 9- and 10-year-old children were randomly assigned to one of the following three instructional conditions: (a) guided instruction consisting of examples and student-generated explanations, (b) direct instruction consisting of a…

This article presents the results of a study examining the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (CF) on the simple past tense and the impact beliefs may have on students' uptake of the feedback they receive. A seven-week study was carried out with 42 advanced EFL learners in Vientiane, Laos. Students' beliefs about written CF were first…

Extension educators are often considered influential community leaders. Still the question remains--how do educators motivate themselves to success? Does this contribute towards their self-leadership perceptions? Specialists from three universities administered a survey to look at the "self-leadership" of Extension educators. Results…

According to the authors, five years ago their school district embraced Understanding by Design as the organizing framework for curriculum. The emphasis on enduring understandings and essential questions led the sixth grade social studies teachers to reevaluate what they were teaching in their World History Curriculum. Together the authors worked…

Recently, the significant role that pronunciation and prosody plays in processing spoken language has been widely recognized and a variety of teaching methodologies of pronunciation/prosody has been implemented in teaching foreign languages. Thus, an analysis of how similarly or differently native and L2 learners of a language use…