Some professors claim college students seek the easy way out and prefer classes that lack challenge. In a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional ethnographic research study of the attainment of gender parity in an engineering department, it emerged that student attitudes toward challenge did not support this perception. By far, the majority of…

This study examines the relationships between students' academic motivation, evidence of achievement as measured by assessments and the effects of feedback in mediating effort. Policy makers currently view student achievement is as synonymous with proficiency on standardized tests. Testing students as a means of determining educational…

This study is designed to address aspects of self-regulation and self-efficacy as they relate to critical issues in the design and evaluation of online learning programs. It begins with a discussion of the rapid growth of distance learning programs at all levels and across virtually all disciplines of educational programming. Much of this…

This paper reports a project in which researchers at universities in Japan explored the use of Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) practices by developing a learning module intended to help improve students' scores on the TOEIC Listening and Reading Tests. MALL practices are currently being developed at universities in Japan because almost…

Teachers' influence on students' learning motivation is a well-researched topic. Nevertheless, the majority of such studies are situated in the conventional learning context despite the rapid growth of distance language learning. This study set out to investigate tutors' influence on students' learning motivation in the Chinese distance language…

The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of Digital storytelling (DST) on the academic achievement, critical thinking, and learning motivation of senior high school students learning English as a foreign language. The one-year study adopted a pretest and posttest quasi-experimental design involving 110 10th grade students in two English…

This article reports on an action research project undertaken with the primary aim of investigating the extent to which a feature film, whose plot included Tesla's demonstrations on the wireless transmission of electrical energy, can promote scientific enquiry. The class that participated in this project was an 11th grade class in a rural area of…

To motivate student learning, the affective domain--emotion, attitude, and motivation--must be engaged. We propose a model that is specific to the geosciences with theoretical components of motivation and emotion from the field of educational psychology, and a term we are proposing, "connections with Earth" based on research in the…

The purpose of this study was three-fold: to measure the ability of the "Medical Explorers" case-based curriculum to improve higher order thinking skills; to evaluate the impact of the "Medical Explorers" case-based curriculum to help students be self directed learners; and to investigate the impact of the "Medical…

Existing evidence suggests that high stakes exams result in little increased learning among students. Yet, given the federal mandates for greater accountability, such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation and Race to the Top policies, and the "pervasive testing culture," the use of high-stakes tests is presently an accepted…

Despite the increased use of new learning technologies, there is still much to be learned about the role of learner characteristics in online learning. The purpose of this study was to examine how subjects' characteristics normally associated with effective training (i.e., initial motivation to learn and self-efficacy) related to learning in a…

Despite the importance of improving students' ability to learn from text, relatively little research has been conducted on motivational and instructional aspects of text learning, especially in real classroom contexts. The present study aimed to obtain a more comprehensive picture of the motivational and cognitive processes involved in children's…

There are many definitions, views and theories for motivation. This study aims to state expressly what type of motivation factors according to the students' grades affects the students of German Language Teaching Departments (Turkey) negatively or positively. How the external and internal factors affect the students of German Language Teaching…

It is crucial for teachers to communicate effectively about educational objectives to students, colleagues, and others in education. In 1956, Bloom developed a cognitive learning taxonomy to enhance communication between college examiners. The Bloom taxonomy consists of 6 hierarchical levels of learning (knowledge, comprehension, application,…

As language learning theory has shifted from a highly guided to a more open learning process, this paper presents the teaching/learning philosophy called Learning for Life (L for L) as a great way to motivate native Spanish speaker students learning English as a foreign language, and to help them be the constructors of their own knowledge. The…