Self-efficacy, a core construct of Bandura's social cognitive theory, has wide appeal and usefulness in the health and social sciences. Self-efficacy is frequently used across disciplines to assess an individual's beliefs about her likelihood to engage in a certain behavior. Because of the behavioral-change approaches common in rehabilitation…

Based on a critical re-analysis of cognitive load theory (CLT), Schnotz and Kurschner identified the need for research on more sensitive ways of assessing learner characteristics, both prior to and during instruction, in order to understand learning processes and outcomes. One emergent theme of the papers in this special issue is that the "same"…

The integration of Microsoft's PowerPoint and other slideware programs into the classroom setting may hinder educational progress rather than help it. An examination of the literature focusing on Cognitive Load Theory recognizes that students' have a limited tolerance for the amount of sights and sounds on display at any given time, especially in…

The University of Chicago met widespread national opposition ten years ago after it instituted a new, less demanding core curriculum to make way for more electives. It was part of a plan to make the curriculum significantly less demanding in order to attract more students and improve the school's bottom line in a time of putative budget deficits.…

Over the past 25 years, there has been a call for change within American higher education, with an increasing number of foundations, national organizations, and individual researchers pushing for institutions of higher education to become more involved with the surrounding communities and American society (Campus Compact, 2011; Glass &…

Master's education is the largest segment of graduate education in the United States yet there is a paucity of research about how master's students experience their programs. Empirical research on student engagement--defined as the time and effort students devote to activities that are linked to educational outcomes and what institutions do to…

This article reports on an exploratory study aimed to identify which ways of marking required and optional fields help older people fill in web forms correctly. Drawing on a pilot study and selective attention research in ageing, modified versions of widely used forms were created, in which standard asterisks were replaced with one of three…

Social and mobile technologies offer users unprecedented opportunities for communicating, interacting, sharing, meaning-making, content and context generation. And, these affordances are in constant flux driven by a powerful interplay between technological innovation and emerging cultural practices. Significantly, also, they are starting to…

This paper reports on a pilot investigation into web conferencing in a distance learning module. It focuses on the perceptions and experiences of the tutors, all of whom were new to the web conferencing environment, but were experienced in online teaching. A number of web conferencing tutorials were studied through the collection of various…

This article offers a linguistic analysis of interpersonal stancetaking in four argumentative term papers written in an upper-level undergraduate course in economics. Two of the papers were written by English L2 writers who experienced particular difficulty with the assignment and two by English L1 writers who received the highest grades among the…

This paper reports findings of a post test experimental control group design conducted to investigate the role of modified Moore learning approach on improving students' mathematical understanding and proving abilities. Subjects of study were 56 undergraduate students of one state university in Bandung, who took advanced abstract algebra course.…

This paper reports activities (as part of a university course in language teacher education on teaching reading) in which primary school student teachers (all ESL in-service teacher trainees) explored their own skills of determining textbook readability using an online software tool and a cloze test completed by two hundred and seventy-eight Grade…

There is much debate on the merits and pitfalls of standardized tests for college admission, with questions regarding the format (multiple-choice versus constructed response), cognitive complexity, and content of these assessments (achievement versus aptitude) at the forefront of the discussion. This study addressed these questions by…

In a Spring 2011 survey about professional development opportunity needs, Austin Independent School District teachers and campus administrators most often requested training in the state's new academic assessment and using technology.

Previously, a small scale, interview-based, 3-year longitudinal study (ages 11-14) in one school had suggested a learning progression related to the concept of a substance. This article presents the results of a large-scale, cross-sectional study which used Rasch modeling to test the hypothesis of the learning progression. Data were collected from…