Students' understanding of object-oriented (OO) program execution was studied by asking students to draw a picture of a program state at a specific moment. Students were given minimal instructions on what to include in their drawings in order to see what they considered to be central concepts and relationships in program execution. Three drawing…

We examined how first year students (10th grade) of Greek Senior High School could conceptualize the influence of the molecular weight of saturated fatty acids on the melting and the freezing point, during the "change of phase" phenomenon using the Microcomputer-Based Laboratory (MBL) system. Students had to freeze a melted substance,…

Representatives from more than 20 institutions making up a research and teaching network met to discuss and investigate a web application designed to promote knowledge sharing and understanding. The web application, called Fieldtrip, enables students, professors and researchers to virtually share their experiences and findings from real field…

Interactive applets have the ability to enhance statistics teaching by providing multiple representations of new concepts and by facilitating experimentation. I introduce two applets that have been developed as aids in illustrating ideas relevant to hypothesis testing and describe how I have used these in my classes. (Contains 4 figures.)

In the old days, professional development didn't extend any further than the workshops teachers would attend to learn new applications. After the workshop, the teachers were on their own once they returned to school and had to figure out how to use their new tools. Today, things are different as technologies are too complex and the need to…

Technology-based instruction represents a new recent pedagogical paradigm that is rooted in the realization that new generations are much more comfortable with, and excited about, new technologies. The rapid technological advancement over the past decade has fueled an enormous demand for the integration of modern networking, informational and…

In this article we present a review of the state of the art in mathematical e-learning and some personal experiences on this area developed during the last eleven years at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), a completely online university located in Spain. The article discusses important aspects related to online mathematics courses offered in…

Clinical research in expressive therapies, psychodrama in particular, offer education researchers and software designers descriptive analyses and evidence-based impact studies on attitudinal shifts and enhanced problem solving abilities for patients and students who participate in psychodrama role-play. Gaming environments and virtual worlds that…

This study measures changes in teaching practices that occurred during a school year that included laptop implementation and professional development. The changes were documented through direct observations of more than 400 classrooms in more than 50 K-12 schools in 11 Florida districts. Trained observers used two valid observation instruments to…

We built an NLP system implementing a "virtual writing conference" for elementary-school children, with German as the target language. Currently, state-of-the-art computer support for writing tasks is restricted to multiple-choice questions or quizzes because automatic parsing of the often ambiguous and fragmentary texts produced by pupils…

Whereas most research on computer-assisted language learning (CALL) tends to rely heavily on the assessment of academic achievement and language learning outcomes, this study involved an evaluation of the psychosocial learning environment in computing laboratories. The What Is Happening In this Class? (WIHIC) and Attitude to Computers and…

In this paper, we describe an initial exploratory study designed to compare the outcomes of online listening and online text-based tasks in the context of the study of Italian at The University of Melbourne. Our findings allow us to characterise online listening and online reading as a qualitative difference between deep and surface approaches to…

This article discusses an experiment in sending regular Short Message Service (SMS) messages to support language learning, and vocabulary learning in particular, at beginners' level in Italian at an Australian university. The approach we took built on the initiatives of Thornton and Houser (2005) and Dias (2002b), and was informed by the results…

Obesity has been recognized as a worldwide public health problem. It significantly increases the chances of developing several diseases, including Type II diabetes. The roles of insulin and leptin in obesity involve reactions that can be better understood when they are presented step by step. The aim of this work was to design software with data…

Purpose: The purposes of this study were (a) to identify cognitive abilities and other factors related to successful completion of training for computer-based tasks that simulated real jobs and (b) to create a brief assessment battery useful in assessing older adults for these kinds of jobs. Design and Methods: Participants from three age groups…