The German /r/ sound is one of the most difficult sounds for American English (AE) speakers who are learning German as a foreign language to produce. The standard German /r/ variant [/R/] and dialectal variant [R] are achieved by varying the tongue constriction degree, while keeping the place of articulation constant [Schiller and Mooshammer…

Formative feedback enables comparison to be made between a learner's current understanding and a desired learning goal. Obtaining this information is a time consuming task that most tutors cannot afford. We therefore wished to develop a support software tool, which provides tutors and learners with information that identifies a learner's progress,…

Using course materials to promote visual literacy skills is an important aspect of undergraduate science education. A comparison study was undertaken to determine the composition of visual representations, specifically representations of data generated from experimental research, found in general biology and discipline-specific textbooks compared…

Research on shallow processing suggests that readers sometimes encode only a superficial representation of a text and fail to make use of all available information. Greene, McKoon, and Ratcliff (1992) extended this work to pronouns, finding evidence that readers sometimes fail to automatically identify referents even when these are unambiguous. In…

How does prior context influence lexical and discourse-level processing during real-time language comprehension? Experiment 1 examined whether the referential ambiguity introduced by a repeated, anaphoric expression had an immediate or delayed effect on lexical and discourse processing, using an eye-tracking-while-reading task. Eye movements…

The expression of expert motor skills typically involves learning to perform a precisely timed sequence of movements. Research examining incidental sequence learning has relied on a perceptually cued task that gives participants exposure to repeating motor sequences but does not require timing of responses for accuracy. In the 1st experiment, a…

Content and emphases in undergraduate biochemistry courses can be readily tailored to accommodate the standards of the department in which they are housed, as well as the backgrounds of the students in the courses. A more challenging issue is how to construct laboratory experiences for a class with both chemistry majors, who usually have little or…

Three undergraduate students functioned as teaching assistants in unit ops lab for their senior project, which included developing a purchased size exclusion chromatography experiment, supervising the running of this experiment, and assisting the junior students with their calculations. They also read the reports, graded them, and commented on…

Combinatorial abilities are fundamental to experimental thinking. The aim of this work was to design didactic objects that will stimulate preschoolers' experimental thinking and to study young children's thinking in relation to these objects. Six heuristic rules for the design of didactic objects are specified, and the responses of 623 children…

The present research tested the hypothesis that the age at which one's first language (L1) words are learned influences language processing in bilinguals. Prior research on bilingual language processing by Kroll and colleagues has suggested that memory links between L1 words and conceptual representations are stronger than memory links between…

An initial goal of chemistry laboratory courses is almost always the "proper" use of laboratory resources including glassware and instruments. The proper use of glassware encompasses many topics, such as laboratory safety, technical proficiency, and recognition of function. However, as many chemical educators can attest, at both the K-12 and…

James Clerk Maxwell "translated" Michael Faraday's experimentally-based field theory into the mathematical representation now known as "Maxwell's Equations." Working with a variety of mathematical representations and physical models Maxwell extended the reach of Faraday's theory and brought it into consistency with other…

This article provides a detailed description of the use of Nintendo Wii game controllers in physics demonstrations. The main features of the controller relevant to physics are outlined and the procedure for communicating with a PC is described. A piece of software written by the author is applied to gathering data from a controller suspended from…

We report a comparative study using "knowledge space theory" (KAT) to assess the impact of a hands-on laboratory exercise that used molecular model kits to emphasize the connections between a plane of symmetry, Charity, and isomerism in an introductory organic chemistry course. The experimental design compared three groups of…

Successful completion of organic chemistry is a prerequisite for many graduate and professional programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, yet the failure rate for this sequence of courses is notoriously high. To date, few studies have examined why some students succeed while others have difficulty in organic chemistry. This…