Automated scoring has the potential to dramatically reduce the time and costs associated with the assessment of complex skills such as writing, but its use must be validated against a variety of criteria for it to be accepted by test users and stakeholders. This study addresses two validity-related issues regarding the use of e-rater® with the…

This study describes the tutoring interactions of four early childhood preservice tutors, two able and two less able, to document the tutoring strategies they applied as they provided support for their first-grade student at point of need. The two more able tutors provided various prompts to foster their students' use of strategies, thus…

Play is widely acknowledged to be an integral part of human development and children with autism often experience substantial delays in the development of play behaviors. This review updates older reviews by covering the last 10 years of research targeting functional and symbolic play in children with autism. The review differs from other reviews…

Since M. M. Chun and Y. Jiang's (1998) original study, a large body of research based on the contextual cuing paradigm has shown that the visuocognitive system is capable of capturing certain regularities in the environment in an implicit way. The present study investigated whether regularities based on the semantic category membership of the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of question prompts on student learning in relation to their learning styles. The context of the study is technology-enhanced learning in an ill-structured domain. Design/methodology/approach: The study conditions were the same for all the students in the four learning style groups.…

The general purpose of the present study was to examine the effectiveness of simultaneous prompting embedded in activities for teaching preparatory skills to children with developmental disabilities. Furthermore, determining the perspectives of the teachers about the skills taught to the participants and also to themselves were targeted. Depending…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether the use of a personal digital assistant (PDA), with picture, auditory, and video prompts, would serve as a portable self-prompting device to facilitate independent task performance by high school age students with moderate intellectual disabilities. A multiple probe design was used across three…

This paper presents findings from a correlational study of the relationship between teachers' vocabulary instruction practices and pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children's vocabulary. We observed sixteen teachers during three 90-minute language arts blocks, and we assessed the performance of their 244 children on knowledge of target words and…

Researchers have consistently shown the effectiveness of functional communication training (FCT) to address both the communication and behavioral needs of children on the autism spectrum. The three steps of FCT include completing a functional behavior assessment, identifying a communication response, and developing a treatment plan. In addition,…

Sample-size requirements were considered for automated essay scoring in cases in which the automated essay score estimates the score provided by a human rater. Analysis considered both cases in which an essay prompt is examined in isolation and those in which a family of essay prompts is studied. In typical cases in which content analysis is not…

The present study attempted to further existing literature on increasing safe driving practices through visual prompts by targeting turn signal use at a 4-way intersection. Drivers exiting a university parking garage were presented with a visual prompt ("Please Signal and Drive Safely") and then observed for turn signal use while entering an…

The role of culture as a phenomenon guided this qualitative study, which examined the influence of diverse Hispanic cultures on the attitudes and perceptions towards college writing courses of female Hispanic students who are non-native speakers of English. With the increasing number of Hispanic immigrants coming to the U.S., the minority student…

This paper reports on a controlled experiment on the effects of three types of reflection triggers in an online course. Fifty-four volunteers, distributed in five groups, used these structured opportunities for reflection during learning. Results show that reflection triggers were extensively employed by the test persons and were perceived as…

Objectives: This study investigated the effects of multiple prompts, telephone calls, and written reminders on attendance at group support meetings in a long-term residential facility for survivors of domestic violence. Methods: Participants were 15 Hispanic women who were residing in the facility at the time of the study. Prompts to attend the…

This study assessed effectiveness of simultaneous prompting procedure in teaching two middle school students with cognitive impairment decimal subtraction using regrouping. A multiple baseline, multiple probe design replicated across subjects successfully taught two students with cognitive impairment at middle school level decimal subtraction…