A positive association between interest and learning from texts has been well noted in the literature. However, the cause of the positive association between interest and learning from text is uncertain. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to examine a potential cause, inference generation, of the positive association between interest and…

Emotions play a significant role in healthy cognitive functioning; they impact memory, attention, decision-making and attitude; and are therefore influential in learning and achievement. Consequently, affective diagnoses constitute an important aspect of human teacher-learner interactions motivating efforts to incorporate skills of affect…

Social studies teachers are charged with the task of developing students' understandings as students engage in critical examination of social studies issues and topics. Teachers often use test items from textbooks or instructional resources, or create their own classroom assessments with no specific pedagogical foundation. All too often, these…

In this study it is aimed to describe and evaluate comparatively the reading literacy exam results, the finance of education and schools, and socio-cultural status of parents in Turkey and the top-five OECD countries, Finland, Korea, Canada, Australia, New Zealand respectively, in the light reports and publications by OECD regarding PISA 2003 and…

Understanding the ways in which teachers make sense of what they do and why is critical to a broader understanding of pedagogy. Historically, teachers have been understood through the thematic and content analysis of their beliefs or philosophies. In this paper, we argue that discourse analysis (DA) involves a much finer-grained analysis of the…

We examined developmental changes in children's inductive inferences about biological concepts as a function of knowledge of properties and concepts. Specifically, 4- to 5-year-olds and 9- to 10-year-olds were taught either familiar or unfamiliar internal, external, or functional properties about known and unknown target animals. Children were…

This paper articulates debates surrounding the concept of Continuous Assessment (CA) in South African schools. Although the research was focused on schools in this democratic country, it became evident from the findings that assessment is still a challenge besetting both General Education and Training (GET)and Further Education and Training Bands…

The issue addressed in this study is whether propositional integration and world-knowledge inference can be distinguished as separate processes during the comprehension of Dutch "omdat" (because) sentences. "Propositional integration" refers to the process by which the reader establishes the type of relation between two clauses…

The aim of this research was to determine whether the new geographic information technologies, included as teaching objectives in the new European Space for Higher Education Engineering degrees, develop spatial abilities. Bearing this in mind, a first year seminar using the INSPIRE Geoportal (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) was…

"Survey Toolkit Collecting Information, Analyzing Data and Writing Reports" (Walsh, 2009a) is discussed as a survey research curriculum used by the author's sixth grade students. The report describes the implementation of "The Survey Toolkit" curriculum and "TinkerPlots"[R] software to provide instruction to students learning a project based…

Many universities rely on data gathered from tests that are low stakes for examinees but high stakes for the various programs being assessed. Given the lack of consequences associated with many collegiate assessments, the construct-irrelevant variance introduced by unmotivated students is potentially a serious threat to the validity of the…

The purpose of this study was to examine Turkish English as a Foreign Language Learners' (EFL) handling of unknown words while reading English texts. The study also examines the relationship between these learners' perceptions and actual practices in the employment of knowledge sources while trying to guess the meaning of unknown words. The…

Students' informal inferential reasoning (IIR) is often inconsistent with the normative logic underlying formal statistical methods such as Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), even after instruction. In two experiments reported here, student's IIR was assessed using an intuitive ANOVA task at the beginning and end of a statistics course. In both…

The vast majority of second language (L2) vocabulary research focuses on learners' knowledge of isolated word forms. However, it is unclear to what extent this knowledge can be used as an indicator of knowledge in context (i.e. reading and listening). This study aims to shed light on this issue by comparing ESL learners' knowledge of the meaning…

Despite the widespread popularity of growth curve analysis, few studies have investigated robust growth curve models. In this article, the "t" distribution is applied to model heavy-tailed data and contaminated normal data with outliers for growth curve analysis. The derived robust growth curve models are estimated through Bayesian…