This paper reports on results of empirical research investigating written summaries of first-year Japanese university students, their task representations of summary writing, and the relationships between their representations and task performance. Data for this study were obtained by asking 108 students to read an English text and write a summary…

The purpose of this study was to explore the spelling knowledge and skills of elementary school children with and without dyslexia who speak Dutch, a language with a relatively transparent orthography. Children in Grades 2-6 completed real and pseudoword spelling dictation tasks. Spelling performance was compared in 218 children with (n = 55) and…

Purpose: Research has demonstrated that verbal instructions directing attention externally (i.e., toward the effect of the movement) significantly enhance motor skill performance, and this effect is enhanced when the distance of the external focus relative to the body is increased. However, few studies have investigated this distance-of-focus…

The RI-Val model of comprehension includes a validation process in which linkages formed by integration are matched against active memory. In five experiments, we investigated factors that influence validation. Reading times were measured on target sentences that contained either correct information or semantically related, but incorrect content.…

Student problem solving in the context of a dynamic mathematics environment (DME) has previously been investigated primarily through the lens of whether or not the student could complete a problem-solving task. Herein, we investigate what trajectories students employ in the realms of mathematics, technology, and problem solving as they attempt to…

The learning-style theory of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) (Qian, Lipkin, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5:77, 2011) states that ASD individuals differ from neurotypics in the way they learn and store information about the environment and its structure. ASD would rather adopt a "lookup-table" strategy (LUT: memorizing each…

This article aims at proposing a new measurement to assess the effects of language learners' goal-setting behavior, as an alternative to the traditional open-ended questionnaire. This goal-setting instrument was carefully developed through three phases. In the first phase, an item pool was generated. In the second phase, a pilot study was carried…

Response time variability and its changes over time have been interpreted as indicative of levels of knowledge automatization. Predominantly, only declines in variability have been examined over the course of practice and growing second language proficiency. We discuss possible scenarios that may involve increasing, rather than declining…

Small-group discussions in which teachers and students interact with text are common in language arts classrooms. As documented in the extant literature, teacher discourse moves affect how the discussion unfolds and the resulting quality of the talk. What is not present in the literature is a unified lexicon or taxonomy for defining and…

Mathematics can be viewed as complex structures comprising intricate and profoundly useful webs of relationships. Students can experience mathematics in this way when working on mathematical tasks such as problem-solving, modelling, investigations or problem posing. Yet these kinds of tasks are seldom implemented in many upper-secondary and…

Despite the overwhelming amount of research on students' interpretations of rates of change in real-world physical science contexts, similar studies in real-world economic contexts are sparse. Contributing towards addressing this gap in knowledge, this study reports on how 12 pairs of business calculus students interpreted marginal change…

The article analyses the problems arising in teaching English at a technical university, offers and describes a new integrated method of teaching listening, reading and speaking called the Communicative Circle method. The development of the pragmatic, integrated method of Communicative Circle builds upon the linguo-didactic, integrated, and…

The literature on task planning abounds with studies in laboratory or classroom contexts; however, the contribution of task planning to the testing context has remained a largely uncharted area of enquiry. The current study is primarily focused on exploring the impacts of pressured vs. unpressured on-line task planning conditions on EFL students'…

Sight translation (ST) has always been considered one of the tasks covered in Public Service Interpreting (PSI). It has been included in handbooks, and it is also a frequent exercise in PSI assessment. However, few studies have analysed how ST is performed in the framework of a triadic interaction. This study is an attempt to redress this gap and…

This study explored the use of heuristics in the design space by novice and expert engineers in the initial ideation of a design solution. Verbal protocol analyses were conducted with four engineering students and four professional engineers as they generated ideas to solve a design problem. Overall, both experts and novices used various types of…