The purpose of this experimental study was to investigate the effects of metacognitive reflective assessment instruction on student achievement in mathematics. The study compared the performance of 141 students who practiced reflective assessment strategies with students who did not. A posttest-only control group design was employed, and results…

This study examines the contribution of epistemological beliefs to middle school students' reported use of self-regulated learning strategies. One hundred and sixty 8th and 9th graders from three public middle schools participated in the study. Gender was about equally represented in the sample (89 girls, 71 boys). During the group examination…

In this essay, the authors argue that understanding students' learning styles is likely to (a) help teachers recognize the causes of some academic problems, and (b) lead to better planned, differentiated instruction. Learning style, as defined by Dunn and Dunn, is highlighted, and research supporting its effectiveness is outlined. By citing…

In this article the authors specifically address the use of narratives in the form of analogies as an experiential learning activity. The use of analogies as an experiential learning tool in multicultural education can be helpful in a number of ways. Analogies provide an alternative tool for processing multicultural topics with students who have…

Introductory biology courses typically present topics on related biological systems across separate chapters and lectures. A complete foundational understanding requires that students understand how these biological systems are related. Unfortunately, spontaneous generation of these connections is rare for novice learners. These experiments focus…

Previous research showed that motivation influences writing in school settings (Hidi & Boscolo, 2006), but further empirical research is needed to understand how motivation influences specific writing tasks (Bruning & Horn, 2000; Haswell, 2006). This study addresses that gap in research by investigating how the motivational construct of…

Electronic books have rapidly moved through the entertainment community and are rapidly making their way into the academic environment. Public and private schools, libraries and training organizations use eBooks for research and instruction. This study sought to enhance the learning habits of students taking self-paced correspondence courses…

We present five strategies that mathematics majors can use to improve their proof comprehension. We argue these strategies are effective by presenting qualitative excerpts illustrating the ways in which the employment of these strategies helped four undergraduate students understand the proofs they were reading. Furthermore, we present results of…

High school mathematics students often complete homework and study for unit tests without support to consider how these actions could contribute to their mathematical learning. Learning to learn mathematics invites students to bring into view how they learn mathematics. The constructivist grounded theory study reported in this presentation…

In this article, we report on the findings of an exploratory study into the experience of undergraduate students as they learn new mathematical models. Qualitative and quantitative data based around the students' approaches to learning new mathematical models were collected. The data revealed that students actively adopt three approaches to…

This paper considers the issue raised in 2008 by Gillian Brown in her article "Selective listening" regarding whether nouns are "privileged" in memory over verbs during listening tasks, and whether attention to nouns, at least in the early stages of L2 learning, is a desirable strategy to be taught to learners, as Brown…

Three experiments demonstrated learners' abilities to adaptively and qualitatively accommodate their encoding strategies to the demands of an upcoming test. Stimuli were word pairs. In Experiment 1, test expectancy was induced for either cued recall (of targets given cues) or free recall (of targets only) across 4 study-test cycles of the same…

A primary task of teachers is to promote the culture of collaboration in classrooms. That's because we are smarter together than we are alone. But for teachers to leverage the unique social capacity of classrooms, they need to understand how to create situations requiring and rewarding collaboration (like that of inquiry), how to structure groups,…

This study examined the notion that active procrastinators are a positive type of procrastinators who possess desirable characteristics similar to non-procrastinators, but different from the traditional passive procrastinators. A two-step procedure was followed to categorise university students (N = 125) as active procrastinators, passive…

Evaluation of programs or projects is often perceived as a threat. This is to a great extent related to the anticipated use of evaluation for accountability, which is often prioritized at the expense of using evaluation as a learning tool. Frequently it is argued that there is a trade-off between these two evaluation functions. An alternative…