Integrated writing tasks that involve different language modalities such as reading and listening have increasingly been used as means to assess academic writing. Thus, there is a need for understanding how test-takers coordinate different skills to complete these tasks. This study explored second language writers' strategy use and its…

The use of video technology has become widespread in the teaching and testing of second-language (L2) listening, yet research into how this technology affects the learning and testing process has lagged. The current study investigated how the channel of input (audiovisual vs. audio-only) used on an L2 listening test affected test-taker…

The purposes of this study were to investigate the effects of an intervention designed to improve at-risk 4th graders' understanding of fractions and to examine the processes by which effects occurred. The intervention focused more on the measurement interpretation of fractions; the control condition focused more on the part-whole interpretation…

Schools nationwide are transitioning to the Common Core--our advice to you: Be prepared, but don't go it alone! Our new book, "Common Core Literacy Lesson Plans: Ready-to-Use Resources, 9-12," shows you that teaching the Common Core State Standards in high school doesn't have to be intimidating! This easy-to-use guide meets the particular needs of…

Schools nationwide are transitioning to the Common Core--our advice to you: Don't go it alone! Our new book, "Common Core Literacy Lesson Plans: Ready-to-Use Resources, K-5," shows you that teaching the Common Core State Standards in the elementary grades doesn't have to be intimidating! This easy-to-use guide provides model lesson plans for…

Schools nationwide are transitioning to the Common Core--our advice to you: Don't go it alone! Our new book, "Common Core Literacy Lesson Plans: Ready-to-Use Resources, 6-8," shows you that teaching the Common Core State Standards in the middle grades doesn't have to be intimidating! This easy-to-use guide meets the particular needs of middle…

The authors spend their days making decisions. Often, the consequences of their choices seemingly affect only a handful of stakeholders. Regrettably, when they rely on a scattershot approach to gauging stakeholders' opinions, they often find themselves off the mark. Perhaps, they give too much credence to "squeaky wheels" even though their views…

This article tries to answer two related questions: (i) what do children hear while listening to and making sense of music? and (ii) what kind of representational tools can be used to assess this sense-making? To answer these questions, we set up two empirical studies in which 89 children--8-9-year-olds and 11-12-year-olds (first study)--and 331…

Purpose: Acquisition of prosodic control appears to evolve across development with younger children relying on durational cues and older children utilizing a broader spectrum of cues including fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration. This study aimed to determine whether unfamiliar listeners could identify prosodic contrasts produced by 4-,…

Three studies using the intermodal preferential looking paradigm examined onset of productive comprehension of tense/aspect morphology in English. When can toddlers understand these forms with novel verbs and novel events? The first study used familiar verbs and showed that 26-36-month olds correctly matched a past/perfective form ("-ed" or…

Background: Reading component models such as the Simple View of Reading (SVR; Gough & Tunmer, 1986; Hoover & Gough, 1990) provide a concise framework for describing the processes and skills involved when readers comprehend texts. According to the Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading (Rose, 2006) strong evidence for the SVR…

In the article, we explore conditions under which people may allow their listening to be interrupted, that is, allow themselves to start listening for something they had not been trying to hear previously. We present empirical evidence for the conditions by analyzing an interview with a teacher who tells us how his listening was interrupted as he…

It is well-established that linguistic processing is primarily a left-hemisphere activity, while emotional prosody processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere. Does attention, directed at different regions of the talker's face, reflect this pattern of lateralization? We investigated visuospatial attention across a talker's face with a…

Montessori teachers know that no matter how many books they read on child development and brain research, there is no substitute for observing children, seeing them, noticing them, and especially, in the case of the adolescent, being quiet long enough for them to talk. Wanting to know more about the hidden depths of the adolescent soul, the author…

The present study investigated the influence of within- and between-ear congruency on interference and laterality effects in an auditory semantic/prosodic conflict task. Participants were presented dichotically with words (e.g., mad, sad, glad) pronounced in either congruent or incongruent emotional tones (e.g., angry, happy, or sad) and…