We investigated whether the tendency to imitate or emulate is influenced by the availability of causal information, and the amount of information available in a display. Three and 5-year-old children were shown by either a live or video model how to obtain a reward from either a clear or an opaque puzzle box. Some of the actions in the sequence…

This paper presents a case study of a teaching intervention designed to enrich Year 2 students' theory of biology through the introduction of causal mechanisms of inheritance such as the gene and DNA. The researchers worked collaboratively with the classroom teacher to design the intervention based on the students' prior knowledge of living things…

Software-engineering education programs are intended to prepare students for a field that involves rapidly changing conditions and expectations. Thus, there is always a danger that the skills and the knowledge provided may soon become obsolete. This paper describes results and draws on experiences from the implementation of a computer…

The Educational Testing Service (ETS) created the College Level Examination Program (CLEP) in 1965 and over the years it has become a staple of American higher education. In order to better understand the ramifications of the CLEP program, this article provides a brief history of CLEP and reexamines some of the findings of earlier research. The…

Understanding that learning must be relevant and purposeful to be effective and engaging, Wilhelm emphasizes the value of teaching students "how to participate in meaningful activity in ways that make them increasingly expert in creating culture and . . . cultural meanings." He offers bullet points that suggest starting with students' experiences,…

Listening and reading comprehension can be assessed by analyzing children's visual, verbal, and written representations of their understandings. "Talking Drawings" (McConnell, S. (1993). Talking drawings: A strategy for assisting learners. "Journal of Reading", 36(4), 260-269 is one strategy that enables children to combine…

Previously, we proposed a model of student reasoning which combines the roles of representation, analogy, and layering of meaning--analogical scaffolding [Podolefsky and Finkelstein, Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 3, 010109 (2007)]. The present empirical studies build on this model to examine its utility and demonstrate the vital intertwining of…

In line with the cognitive theory of multimedia learning by Moreno and Mayer (2007), an interactive, multimodal learning environment was designed for the pretraining of science concepts in the joint area of physics, chemistry, biology, applied mathematics, and computer sciences. In the experimental set up, a pretest was embedded in order to…

Teachers can help minority children close the academic achievement gap in intermediate and middle school by combining literacy instruction and content-area material. This connection improves reading achievement and increases curriculum knowledge, even if students have previously experienced difficulty with primary school reading. Fortunately,…

This article describes two consecutive enactments of technology-oriented teacher professional development designs, aimed at helping teachers find high-quality online learning resources and use them in designing effective problem-based learning (PBL) activities for their students. To align with current professional development prescriptions, in the…

This paper is a qualitative case study of a Korean first grade child. The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the nature of a first grade Korean child's oral language interactions with teachers, parents, peers, and community members and to examine how a child's oral language impacts his literacy learning in English. The data were…

Many studies report information overload as one of the main problems that students encounter in online learning via computer-mediated communication. This study aimed to explore the sources of online students' information overload and offer suggestions for increasing students' cognitive resources for learning. Participants were 12 graduate students…

These proceedings contain the papers of the International Conference e-Learning 2016, which was organised by the International Association for Development of the Information Society, 1-3 July, 2016. This conference is part of the Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems 2016, 1-4 July. The e-Learning (EL) 2016 conference aims…

Taking a philosophical approach based on what Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes said about knowledge, this paper addresses some of the murkiness in the conceptual space surrounding the issue of whether prior knowledge does or does not facilitate text comprehension. Specifically, the paper first develops a non-exhaustive typology of cases in which…

Describes an analytical model which provides explicit criteria to identify possible causal relations that a reader might infer between events in order to arrive at a coherent representation of the text. Applies the model to a story, discusses its psychological validity, and compares it to other models of text representation, comprehension, and…