This study explored students' ability to evaluate their learning from a multimedia inquiry unit about the causes of global climate change. Participants were 90 sixth grade students from four science classrooms. Students were provided with a text describing the causes of climate change as well as graphs showing average global temperature changes.…

General problem-solving skills are of central importance in school mathematics achievement. Word problems play an important role not just in mathematical education, but in general education as well. Meaningful learning and understanding are basic aspects of all kinds of learning and it is even more important in the case of learning mathematics. In…

Information and Communication Technology plays an increasingly important role in the lives of learners around the world. The opportunity to seek information through computer has made reading an important language skill. In this hi-tech era, students of undergraduate programs should have high reading ability to comprehend knowledge available online…

This study explores morpho-syntactic reading comprehension in 19 Spanish children who received a cochlear implant (CI) before 24 months of age (early CI [e-CI]) and 19 Spanish children who received a CI after 24 months (late CI [l-CI]). They all were in primary school and were compared to a hearing control (HC) group of 19 children. Tests of…

Situated within second language (L2) research about the acquisition of morphosyntax, this study investigated English L2 speakers' detection and primed production of a novel construction with morphological and structural features. We report on two experiments with Thai (n = 69) and Farsi (n = 70) English L2 speakers, respectively, carried out an…

School readiness evaluations are becoming increasingly popular, and their implementation has become compulsory in an increasing number of kindergartens and schools in Hungary. In recent years, Diagnostic System for Evaluating Development (DIFER), developed by Nagy et al. has been used extensively for the diagnostic study of four- to eight-year-old…

Various studies have found that electronic books (e-books) promote learning, but few works have examined the use of e-books along with an adaptive reading strategy for children. The current study implemented a method to extract keyword cues from e-books to support e-book reading with the read, recite and review (3R) strategy, and then examined the…

This study builds upon previous work aimed at developing a student model of reading comprehension ability within the intelligent tutoring system, iSTART. Currently, the system evaluates students' self-explanation performance using a local, sentence-level algorithm and does not adapt content based on reading ability. The current study leverages…

Referential gaze during situated language production and comprehension is tightly coupled with the unfolding speech stream (Griffin, 2001; Meyer, Sleiderink, & Levelt, 1998; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995). In a shared environment, utterance comprehension may further be facilitated when the listener can exploit the speaker's…

Quantifiers are very common in everyday speech, but we know little about their cognitive basis or neural representation. The present study examined comprehension of three classes of quantifiers that depend on different cognitive components in patients with focal neurodegenerative diseases. Patients evaluated the truth-value of a sentence…

Researchers have emphasized the importance of promoting argumentation in science classrooms for various reasons. However, the study of argumentation is still a young field and more research needs to be carried out on the tools and pedagogical strategies that can assist teachers and students in both the construction and evaluation of scientific…

In this study, we examined 5th grade students' levels of vocabulary knowledge and syntactic awareness relative to their reading comprehension performance. The aim was to explore the contributions of vocabulary and syntactic awareness as potential sources of reading comprehension difficulty for these readers. Overall, we found that both vocabulary…

Natural language contains disfluencies and errors. Do listeners simply discard information that was clearly produced in error, or can erroneous material persist to affect subsequent processing? Two experiments explored this question using a structural priming paradigm. Speakers described dative-eliciting pictures after hearing prime sentences that…

Background: Influential work has explored the role of family socioeconomic status (SES) as an environmental moderator of genetic and environmental influences on cognitive outcomes. This work has provided evidence that socioeconomic circumstances differentially impact the heritability of cognitive abilities, generally supporting the bioecological…

The purpose of this study was to rate oral retellings of fifth graders to determine how passages, raters, and rating occasions affect those ratings, and to identify what combination of those elements produce reliable retelling ratings. A group of 36 fifth grade students read and orally retold three contemporary realistic fiction passages. Two…