Promoting students' conceptual understanding and academic language development is a primary goal of instructors in all subject areas. These goals, however, are sometimes hindered by the way students' learning is assessed. In many college-level courses, knowledge-level tests that assess concrete thinking associated with superficial approaches to…

A major debate in the mental-rotation literature concerns the question of whether objects are represented holistically during rotation. Effects of object complexity on rotational speed are considered strong evidence against such holistic representations. In Experiment 1, such an effect of object complexity was markedly present. A closer look on…

Ultrasonography is increasingly used for teaching anatomy and physical examination skills but its effect on cognitive load is unknown. This study aimed to determine ultrasound's perceived utility for learning, and to investigate the effect of cognitive load on its perceived utility. Consenting first-year medical students (n?=?137) completed…

Rising expectations for middle grade students to independently read and comprehend complex, discipline-specific texts have also raised expectations for the ways teachers will teach. Helping all students, despite assessed reading levels, to access grade level texts calls for instructional approaches that not only meet readers where they are, but…

The discrete anatomy of the eye's intricate oculomotor system is conceptually difficult for novice students to grasp. This is problematic given that this group of muscles represents one of the most common sites of clinical intervention in the treatment of ocular motility disorders and other eye disorders. This project was designed to develop a…

China's higher education system has been marked by dramatic growth since 1999. In response to calls for quality assurance, substantial efforts have been made to improve collegiate environments and enhance student learning. However, only limited empirical research has been conducted to investigate the effects of the college environment on student…

The paper discusses argument pedagogy for graduate and professional students with learning disabilities (LD) in the context of academic writing. To understand the nature and types of writing problems that graduate and professional students with LD experience, the author presents results of a university-wide survey with the students who did and did…

The study investigated the use of Quantum Physics Conceptual Survey (QPCS) in probing student understanding of quantum physics. Altogether 103 Finnish university students responded to QPCS. The mean scores of the student responses were calculated and the test was evaluated using common five indices: Item difficulty index, Item discrimination…

The quality of national examination items plays an enormous role in identifying students' competencies mastery and their difficulties. This study aims to identify the difficult items in the Junior High School Mathematics National Examination, to find the factors that cause students' difficulty and to reveal the strategies that the teachers and the…

Even though peer tutors are often used in gross anatomy courses, research in the field is rather a subject of the last two decades. This is especially true about the didactical challenges these types of peer tutors experience during their tutorials and about how they are prepared for the task. The aim of the presented study was to learn about the…

Schools, as social systems, may knowingly or unintentionally perpetuate inequities through unchallenged oppressive systems. This paper focuses on mathematics as a subject area in school practices in which inequities seem to be considered normal. Issues of racism and racialization in the discipline of mathematics are predominantly lived through the…

A model-based approach for matching language learners to texts of appropriate difficulty is described. Results are communicated to test takers via a targeted reading range expressed on the reporting scale of an automated text complexity measurement tool (ATCMT). Test takers can use this feedback to select reading materials that are well matched to…

The principal purpose of this paper is to critically examine and evaluate the efficacy of the principled eclectic approach to teaching English as second/foreign language (ESL/EFL) writing to undergraduate students. The paper illustrates that this new method adapts mainstream writing pedagogies to individual needs of learners of ESL/EFL in order to…

This study was conducted to create a reliable and valid low- to medium-inference, multidimensional measure of instructor clarity from seminal work across several academic fields. Five hundred and sixty six students responded to an initial pool of 87 items and were split into two samples to investigate the factor structure of the new measurement…

The aim of the paper is to investigate the main factors influencing the adoption and continuous utilization of statistical software among university social sciences students in Slovenia. Based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), a conceptual model was derived where five external variables were taken into account: statistical software…