This paper summarizes the assessment results of the Language Online project at Carnegie Mellon University. The study investigated the effectiveness of online language courses for students' learning outcomes in four hybrid online language courses (elementary and intermediate levels) and their counterpart conventional (offline) courses from Spring…

Educators question whether performing a laboratory experiment as an observer (non-hands-on), such as conducted in a distance education context, can be as effective a learning tool as personally performing the experiment in a laboratory environment. The present paper investigates this issue by comparing the performance of distance education…

As school systems internationally seek to improve the models of professional development they are providing for their teachers to support them in integrating information and communication technology (ICT) in their teaching practice, growing opportunities emerge to compare and contrast approaches employed in different cultural contexts and to learn…

Throughout seven years of teaching in urban schools, the author discovered that the most effective ways to teach difficult literary texts was to refer to students' out-of-school activities. In other words, to connect the "leaky edges of the "social outside"" with the "individual inside" is to create a curriculum of…

The central focus of this research was to test the effectiveness of HyperCard in spelling achievement and to determine if HyperCard had any significant impact on student learning. Four boys and four girls were randomly selected from a second grade classroom at Clark Elementary School in Charlottesville (Virginia) to be part of the experimental…

This study was conducted to test the effect of learning styles and instructional advisement on subjects' achievement test performance, frequency in viewing embedded, elaborated information, time on task, and frequency in receiving instructional advisement in a hypermedia instructional system. In the first of two sessions, a screening test was…

Students with a semester or more of instruction often display remarkable naivety about the language that they have been studying and often prove unable to manage simple programming problems. The main purpose of this study was to create a set of problem-plan-program types for the BASIC programming language to help high school students build plans…

With the emergence of interactive learning technologies, there are many questions which must be addressed concerning young learners. Such sophisticated technology combined with thoughtful instructional design has the potential for both encouraging achievement and stimulating important scholarly attributes such as curiosity and other aspects of…

This document reports an experiment designed to assess the effects of learner control over the level of challenge in computer-assisted instruction (CAI) and collect data that will guide the design of future learner control experiments. The subjects were 78 undergraduate students in the College of Education at a large public university. The CAI…

This study investigated the interaction between cognitive lateral functions and pictorial recognition memory for pictures presented in three different color modes. The stimulus materials used were slides selected from a pool of travel and general geographic scenery slides taken in various parts of North America. One third of the slides were…

To clarify some dimensions of the ever-changing discussion of the ideal future and the best way of achieving it, the author describes a "contrast" institution, the Inter-University Center of Postgraduate Studies, Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, whose four-week courses feature high-intensity eclecticism, dialectics of intellectual contradictions,…

This research compared the effects of a televised presentation and a picture book on children's recall of specific verbal and visual content using 48 third-grade students in Florida as subjects. The children were first stratified by sex and then randomly assigned to view the same story in either a picture book with audiotape or a televised…

This study examined whether the sources of information children use to substantiate story-based inferences are influenced by the medium of delivery. The 48 third grade students who acted as subjects were stratified by sex and randomly assigned to one of two media conditions; i.e., each child was presented an African folktale either (1) as a…

Business statistics is a required course for business and management majors and a prerequisite for advanced courses at the University of Maryland College Park. According to university records, typically 23% of the students enrolled for the course withdraw. The Counseling Center's Learning Assistance Service has a series of 16 45-minute…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of three electronic text variables (run-around, wrap-around, and transparent text) on reading speed and comprehension. One hundred thirty-two undergraduate students in an introductory computer literacy course at a major university were asked to read one of three randomly-distributed passages…