Speech act theory-based, second language pragmatics testing (SLPT) poses problems for validation due to a lack of correspondence with empirical conversational data. Since conversation analysis (CA) provides a richer and more accurate account of language behavior, it may be preferred as a basis for SLPT development. However, applying CA methodology…

Students' views about science were correlated with their approaches to lab practice. Three distinct cases are discussed in detail: empiricist-oriented, rationalist-oriented, and constructivist-oriented students. A coherent epistemological theory was constructed for each case, by considering the different degrees of certainty and confidence each…

In current curriculum materials for middle school students in the US, data and chance are considered as separate topics. They are then ideally brought together in the minds of high school or university students when they learn about statistical inference. In recent studies we have been attempting to build connections between data and chance in the…

To increase the rate at which adult basic skills students advance to and succeed in college-level occupational programs, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) developed the Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training, or I-BEST. In the I-BEST model, a basic skills instructor and an occupational instructor team…

Effects of mobilizing prior knowledge on information processing were studied with 3 groups of 12 adult subjects each. The assumption that activating different kinds of prior knowledge would induce different information processing activities during subsequent text processing (inferencing or elaborating) was tested using passages about fishing…

A modified three-step Delphi procedure was used to conduct a series of national studies of futurists regarded by their peers as top experts in agricultural education. The primary objective was to project enrollments in agricultural education programs for the 21st century. Other study objectives were to ascertain whether the Delphi technique could…

A total of 107 children of 5 and 6 years participated in interactive scenarios in which mastery experiences were pitted against external criticism. The 39 percent of children whose positive assessments were undermined by the criticism were more likely than other children to make broad negative inferences from specific information. A large…

Approaches for norming skewed test score distributions are reviewed, and an analytical approach is proposed for norming the Behavior Assessment System for Children (BASC). Methods used in constructing norms for several well-known personality instruments that are reviewed include: (1) linear T-scores transformation in the Minnesota Multiphasic…

In clinical trials, adaptive allocation means that the therapies assigned to the next patient or patients depend on the results obtained thus far in the trial. Although many adaptive allocation procedures have been proposed for clinical trials, few have actually used adaptive assignment, largely because classical frequentist measures of inference…

An analysis of the role of the word "hence" and its near-synonyms examines the relationship between logic as a science, as a natural language, and as argumentation. The analysis is done in the context of elementary propositional logic. The first section is a limited discussion of the standard logician's treatment relegating "hence" to the realm of…

In decoding a text, one chooses the interpretation involving maximal redundancy, selecting meanings that are most likely and least surprising in the relevant context. Clues for this selection of meanings are gathered from phonetic, phonemic, morphological, syntactic, lexical, and stylistic levels. In disambiguating third-person-pronoun references…

A discussion of pragmatic choice in the use of the possessive pronoun or indefinite article (e.g., "I broke my finger" versus "I broke a finger," and "My leg hurts" versus "A leg hurts") looks at the constructions in the light of a theory of division of pragmatic labor that suggests a binary system of…

The concept of a qualitative model provides a unifying perspective for understanding how expert systems differ from conventional programs. Knowledge bases contain qualitative models of systems in the world, that is, primarily non-numeric descriptions that provide a basis for explaining and predicting behavior and formulating action plans. The…

Pictures abound in history classrooms and teachers use them in many different ways. They add--often literally--some colour to the past, helping us to imagine what different worlds were like. Pictures can be used quite legitimately in this way to fire imagination and stimulate interest. But we can also use them to develop important skills of visual…

Today's technology has reached new heights that have not been fully implemented. One of the areas where technology has not yet reached its full potential is in education. This study examined the effects of concreteness of location names and contiguity of location names with textual information on learning from computer-based reference maps. The…