This study focuses on the long-term retention of basic mathematical techniques in a first-year calculus course, involving a sample group of engineering students at the University of Pretoria. The study investigates which and how much of the basic mathematical knowledge and rote skills acquired in the first year of study is retained after a further…

This study attempted to determine whether children with the combined subtype of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have impairments in cognitive functioning and motor skills. The specific effect of the comorbidity of learning disabilities (LD) was also investigated. A battery of cognitive tests was administered to 26 children with a…

This study examined the effect of a social-behavioral learning strategy intervention (Stop-Observe-Deliberate-Act; SODA) on the social interaction skills of one middle school student with Asperger syndrome (AS). More specifically, the study investigated the effect of SODA training on the ability of one student with AS to participate in cooperative…

A recent proposal suggests that dyslexic individuals suffer from attentional deficiencies, which impair the ability to selectively process incoming visual information. To investigate this possibility, we employed a spatial cueing procedure in conjunction with a single fixation visual search task measuring thresholds for discriminating the…

The life history method, which achieved a prominent position in the Chicago tradition of sociological research in the early 1920s, has been widely adopted for educational inquiries since the 1980s. The power of the life history method in illuminating subjective teacher experiences in social historical contexts has made it "probably the only…

To derive a model for testing, research questions were formulated which asked how long news coverage viewed in the past continues to influence the perceived salience of issues and the rate at which the influence drops off. To do this, some common factors that have been shown to affect public perceptions of issue salience, such as the prominence of…

This paper outlines Explanation Construction Theory, a psychological theory of how people come to comprehend scientific explanations. Explanation Construction Theory has three components: (1) a theory of how scientific knowledge is represented in memory; (2) a taxonomy of different representations that can be formed in response to an encounter…

This paper compares and contrasts two articles in which Dickens constructs an adult identity through his childhood reading, "A Christmas Tree" (1850) and "Nurse's Stories" (1860), with one in which Dickens constructs the identity of a child in his work for children, "A Child's History of England" (1851-53). Infused…

This conference address examines the question of whether "memory work"--using therapeutic techniques to help clients recover suspected hidden memories of childhood sexual abuse--has led some clients to develop illusory memories or false beliefs. Prospective research on memory for childhood trauma indicates that the gist of traumatic…

Research on teachers and teacher thinking finds itself subject to tensions between two prevailing factions. The first sees promise of progress in the rejection of frequently conservative, idiosyncratic teachers' thoughts; the second embraces those thoughts as expressions of a sacred, lived truth. Detecting conflicting mythologies at the core of…

A study tested the ability of 40 students at Ohio University, 20 Americans and 20 Chinese, to recall parts of nine news headlines flashed at them on pieces of paper. Students in communication subjects or linguistics were excluded as being too knowledgeable in communication theories. The hypothesis for the study stated that native Chinese speakers…

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which teachers and students can leverage the power and potential of visuals to encode information and experiences as personalized meanings, and to help people create their own timeless images as ways to understand the world. The foundation is laid for conducting research to test the assertion…

"Deep" approaches to learning, as defined by Biggs (1987) and others, would generally mean that a student is interested in the academic task, searches for meaning in the task, personalizes the task, integrates aspects of the task into a whole, sees relationships between this whole and previous knowledge, and tries to theorize about the…

The K-ABC purports to be a fresh alternative to standardized measures of intellectual functioning, by virtue of separating measurement of acquired factual knowledge from measurement of the ability to solve novel problems. Some researchers have questioned this claim to the capability of distinguishing aptitude and achievement. By analyzing the…

A practicum used a new learning tool to enhance long-term retention of new vocabulary. Sixteen seventh-graders in Language Arts, who had a long-term retention mean score of approximately 40% of newly learned vocabulary, increased their long-term retention of new vocabulary by 25% (a new mean of 65% of new vocabulary). Additional objectives…