Written clarity and conciseness are desired by employers and emphasized in business communication courses. We developed and tested the efficacy of a cueing tool--Scribe Bene--to help students reduce their use of imprecise and ambiguous words and wordy phrases. Effectiveness was measured by comparing cue word usage between a treatment group given…

Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) affects 2-7 percent of school-age children and is characterized by low motor proficiency associated with poor balance, coordination and handwriting skills. Because of their motor difficulties, children with DCD suffer from anxiety, low self-esteem and are often less sociable than typically developing…

As a flexible instructional tool, cue cards offer support for students with and without disabilities. By providing different amounts of support, they also can be used to differentiate instruction in a variety of subject areas and grade levels. This article describes various strategies for using cue cards and includes examples from K-12 classrooms.

Do words cue children's visual attention, and if so, what are the relevant mechanisms? Across four experiments, 3-year-old children (N = 163) were tested in visual search tasks in which targets were cued with only a visual preview versus a visual preview and a spoken name. The experiments were designed to determine whether labels facilitated…

Purpose: One task of childhood involves learning to optimally weight acoustic cues in the speech signal in order to recover phonemic categories. This study examined the extent to which spectral degradation, as associated with cochlear implants, might interfere. The 3 goals were to measure, for adults and children, (a) cue weighting with spectrally…

Our visual brain is remarkable in extracting invariant properties from the noisy environment, guiding selection of where to look and what to identify. However, how the brain achieves this is still poorly understood. Here we explore interactions of local context and global structure in the long-term learning and retrieval of invariant display…

We investigated the effects of rapid assessment tasks and different adaptive restudy prompts in multimedia learning. The adaptivity was based on rapid assessment tasks that were interspersed throughout a multimedia learning environment. In Experiment 1 (N = 52 university students), we analyzed to which extent rapid assessment tasks were reactive…

Making a diagnosis involves ratifying or verifying a proposed answer. Formalizing this verification process with checklists, which highlight key variables involved in the diagnostic decision, is often advocated. However, the mechanisms by which a checklist might allow clinicians to improve their verification process have not been well studied. We…

Purpose: This study compared the use of 2 different types of contextual cues (sentence based and situation based) in 2 different modalities (visual only and auditory only). Method: Twenty young adults were tested with the Illustrated Sentence Test (Tye-Murray, Hale, Spehar, Myerson, & Sommers, 2014) and the Speech Perception in Noise Test…

Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted using written Chinese sentences that contained a multi-word ambiguous region. The goal was to determine whether readers maintained multiple interpretations throughout the ambiguous region or selected a single interpretation at the point of ambiguity. Within the ambiguous region, we manipulated the…

This study explores whether children can use gesture to inform their interpretation of ambiguous pronouns. Specifically, we ask whether four- to eight-year-old English-speaking children are sensitive to information contained in co-referential localizing gestures in video narrations. The data show that the older (7-8 years of age) but not younger…

A frequent procedure used to study how individuals monitor their own learning is to collect judgments of learning (JOLs) during acquisition, considered to be important, in part, because such judgments are assumed to guide how individuals allocate their future learning resources. In such research, however, a tacit assumption is frequently made:…

This article discusses the efficiency of the design of educational activities of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) in Ashaiman municipality in Ghana. Using a descriptive case study design, data was collected from seven (7) Community Based Groups in Ashaiman. The results of the study indicated that to a large extent, there was…

Inversion effect in biological motion perception has been recently attributed to an innate sensitivity of the visual system to the gravity-dependent dynamic of the motion. However, the specific cues that determine the inversion effect in naïve subjects were never investigated. In the present study, we have assessed the contribution of the local…

A new test of children's flexible use of semantic cues for word learning extended previous results. In Experiment 1, three- to five-year-olds (N = 51) completed two tests of interpreting several novel words for the same stimulus arrays. Within-sentence phrasal cues implied different stimulus referent properties. Children's cue-using…