Visualizing the chemical structure and dynamics of particles has been challenging for many students; therefore, various visualizations and tools have been used in chemistry education. For science educators, it has been important to understand how students visualize and represent particular phenomena--i.e., their mental models-- to design more…

This study explored the English language needs of 156 Saudi fellowship doctors and students of medical majors who are enrolled at medical and training programs in Australian hospitals and universities. Data were collected via a questionnaire adopted from a previous study. Participants' responses showed the most frequently used language subskills…

A study was conducted to examine the differences in narrative essays produced by skilled and unskilled EFL student writers. Twenty-six Japanese university students participated in the study. They were told to write a narrative story based on six-frame pictures. The students were classified into two groups, skilled and unskilled, according to the…

This study investigates the role of morphological awareness in the incidental learning of Mandarin Chinese characters among Chinese as second language (CSL) learners. Participants of the study were 20 college-level international students, uniformly Thai in language background, enrolled to study CSL at Southwest University, Chongqing, China. The…

Word reading fluency and word reading accuracy play a critical role in reading development (Perfetti, 1985; Stanovich, 1986) and are related to multiple language components such as phonological, morphological, and vocabulary skills in monolingual children. Our knowledge about this relation remains limited in bilingual children, however. This study…

Complaining is a fundamental human characteristic that has prevailed throughout the ages. We normally complain about something that went wrong. Patient complaints are no exception; they focus on problems that occurred during the episode of care. The Institute of Medicine estimated that each year thousands of patients die due to medical errors. The…

The triad dimensions of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) has been widely used for assessing second language performance and development. Unlike accuracy and fluency, the construct of Chinese syntactic complexity has not been comprehensibly conceptualized or operationalized. Moreover, not tailored to the typological differences such as the…

Measures of teacher effectiveness have become a major research and policy issue due to the increased focus on teacher accountability during the past decade. Growing concerns about the variability in the quality of teaching and traditional approaches to measuring teacher effectiveness led to federal and state policies calling for more rigorous…

Recent years have seen a growing interest in intelligent game-based learning environments featuring virtual agents. A key challenge posed by incorporating virtual agents in game-based learning environments is dynamically determining the dialogue moves they should make in order to best support students' problem solving. This paper presents a…

Getting a large, urban school district to use standards-based education and standards-based grading is challenging. Doing so in one year is monumental. During the 2009-10 school year, Omaha (NE) Public Schools began to study the feasibility of making changes to its traditional grading system. The more closely district personnel investigated the…

The problem of building test collections is central to the development of information retrieval systems such as search engines. The primary use of test collections is the evaluation of IR systems. The widely employed "Cranfield paradigm" dictates that the information relevant to a topic be encoded at the level of documents, therefore…

The kernel method of test equating is a unified approach to test equating with some advantages over traditional equating methods. Therefore, it is important to evaluate in a comprehensive way the usefulness and appropriateness of the Kernel equating (KE) method, as well as its advantages and disadvantages compared with several popular item…

The field of educational data mining has been using the Knowledge Tracing model, which only look at the correctness of student first response, for tracking student knowledge. Recently, lots of other features are studied to extend the Knowledge Tracing model to better model student knowledge. The goal of this paper is to analyze whether or not the…

Multi-touch tablets allow users to interact with computers through intuitive, natural gestures and direct manipulation of digital objects. One advantage of these devices is that they can offer a large, collaborative space where several users can work on a task at the same time. However the lack of privacy in these situations makes standard…

One way to improve students' academic performance is to improve their reading comprehension. Previous investigations demonstrated that testing students on learning material as well as having them use metacognitive strategies have independently improved reading comprehension. The test used in the learning phase in previous investigates has…