This article details the results of a written test designed to reveal how education majors construct and evaluate histograms and frequency polygons. Included is a description of the mistakes made by the students which shows how they tend to confuse histograms with bar diagrams, incorrectly assign data along the Cartesian axes and experience…

For the majority of people in Ireland, Irish is a second language acquired primarily through the schooling system. This study examined the reading strategies children used in response to English and Irish words (presented in isolation), through an analysis of their oral reading errors. Children in their 4th year of schooling attending…

Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is due to the silencing of a single X-linked gene and it is associated with striking attentional difficulties. As FXS is well characterised at the cellular level, the condition provides a unique opportunity to investigate how a genetic dysfunction can impact on the development of neurocomputational properties relevant to…

The impurity of measures is considered as cause of erroneous interpretations of observed relationships. This paper concentrates on impurity with respect to the relationship between working memory and fluid intelligence. The means for the identification of impurity was the fixed-links model, which enabled the decomposition of variance into…

Teachers need to address global climate change with students in their classrooms as evidence for consequences from these environmental changes mounts. One way to approach global climate change is through examination of authentic data. Mathematics and science may be integrated by interpreting graphs from the professional literature. This study…

We examined the effects of previous trials on subsequent trials on performance in the continuous performance test (CPT) in children with attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Thirty-five non-medicated children with ADHD (31 males, four females; mean age 9y 10mo [SD 2y 4mo]) and 33 comparison children (20 males, 13 females; mean age 10y…

This preliminary study explored changes in prosodic variability during choral reading and investigated whether these changes are affected by the method of eliciting choral reading. Ten typical adult talkers recorded three reading materials (poetry, fiction and textbook) in three reading conditions: solo (reading aloud alone), track (reading aloud…

Students are often told to use representations to solve mathematics problems, yet it may be a hindrance for many. This article contains an approach, the Graphic Representational Analysis Process, that teachers can use to analyze representations and focus future instruction. (Contains 7 figures.)

Well-documented Romance-Germanic differences in the use of accent in speech to convey information-structure and focus cause problems for the assessment of prosodic skills in populations with clinical disorders. The strategies for assessing the ability to use lexical and contrastive accent in English and Spanish are reviewed, and studies in the…

Communicative competence is the ultimate goal of most learners of a second language and intelligible pronunciation a fundamental part of it. Unfortunately, learners often lack the opportunity to explore how intelligible their speech is for different audiences. Our research investigates whether synchronous-voice computer-mediated communication…

In a project-based approach to teaching a foreign language at the university level, students are often required to participate in several task-based writing activities. In doing so, language learners not only write incorrect forms, but also correct forms of the same structures, both of which provide useful information on their strengths and…

A specific Normative Location Theory procedure, called hyperbolic approximation (HAP), is suggested as a possible "new" initial-configuration strategy for multidimensional scaling in the city-block metric. First, the performance of this strategy was investigated using fourteen simulated data sets. Second, the scaling in Euclidean space…

The choice of design parameters (e.g., number of subtests, number of items per subtest, and number of examinees per subtest) can be controlled by the test constructor in a multiple matrix sampling evaluation. The purpose of this study was to determine empirically which combination of the above parameters produces the smallest standard errors of…

Article discusses academic practices of expecting excessive rigor. (IR)

Using words of known selection values arranged in a counterbalanced order, it was shown that subjects' ratings of the "imagery value" of each word resulted in error which favored the first position in the series when stimuli were homogeneous. The error did not occur with words which were markedly heterogeneous. (Author)