A fair amount of descriptive research in the field of second language acquisition has looked at the presence of what have been labeled corrective recasts. This research has relied on the methodological practice of coding to identify particular turns as "corrective recasts." Often, the coding criteria make use of the notion of the maintenance of…

This note describes a procedure for estimating the range restriction component used in correcting correlations for unreliability and range restriction when an estimate of the reliability of a predictor is not readily available for the unrestricted sample. This procedure is illustrated with a few examples. (Contains 1 table.)

The task of causal learning concerns figuring out the laws that govern how the world works. The goal of a reasoner who engages in this task is to gain an understanding of the empirical world that would guide decisions regarding actions to achieve the reasoner's objectives. The comments by P. A. White and C. Luhmann and W.-k. Ahn on P. W. Cheng and…

This article provides an overview of research that has investigated the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (WCF) on ESL student writing. In doing so, it highlights a number of shortcomings in the design of some studies and explains what needs to be done in future research so that answers to the issues that have been raised can be…

Grammar checkers do not claim to teach grammar; they are tools to bring potential problems to the writer's attention. They also offer only formal and Standard English preferences, limiting the freer expression of some literary forms. Without guidance, students may misuse the checker, become frustrated, and feel discouraged. Users must be…

Debugging is often difficult and frustrating for novices. Yet because students typically debug outside the classroom and often in isolation, instructors rarely have the opportunity to closely observe students while they debug. This paper describes the details of an exploratory study of the debugging skills and behaviors of contemporary novice Java…

The research reported in the study was undertaken to measure English language teachers' ability to interpret second language learners' intended meanings in idiosyncratic utterances in written English. In doing so, it also aimed at verifying Corder's (1981) speculation that language teachers can correctly guess the intended meanings of learners in…

This study described mathematics teachers' views on the significance of reasonable answers and how they address this concept in their classrooms. Data were gathered from thirteen eighth-grade Kuwaiti mathematics teachers in two middle schools. All teachers in Kuwait use the national textbook and follow the accompanying instructional plans provided…

Suggests that English teachers need to know that grammar is a difficult subject; know what children know about grammar; know that grammatical error is complex; and know more about language than just grammar. Concludes with the advice of Noam Chomsky--that grammar should be taught for its own intrinsic interest. (RS)

Discussion of student modeling and intelligent tutoring systems focuses on the development of the ASSERT algorithm (Acquiring Stereotypical Student Errors by Refining Theories). Topics include overlay modeling; bug libraries (databases of student misconceptions); dynamic modeling; refinement-based modeling; and experimental results from tests at…

Green and Hecht's (1992, 1993) data are consistent with the Monitor hypothesis, and their findings match Krashen's (1982) report: self-correction (SC) has only a modest overall effect. Their subjects' high accuracy of attempted corrections could be the result of subjects' limiting SC to easily correctable items. (Contains 10 references.) (Author)

A memory-based scaling model--ANCHOR--is proposed and tested. The perceived magnitude of the target stimulus is compared with a set of anchors in memory. Anchor selection is probabilistic and sensitive to similarity, base-level strength, and recency. The winning anchor provides a reference point near the target and thereby converts the global…

It is an eye opening experience for students to find out that even a great mathematician like Leibniz made mistakes, forgot to check carefully his calculations, and was temporarily misled by user-friendly but incorrect formulas. From Leibniz's mishap with the derivation of the rules of differentiation students can learn the importance of spending…

D. Hume (1739/1987) argued that causality is not observable. P. W. Cheng claimed to present "a theoretical solution to the problem of causal induction first posed by Hume more than two and a half centuries ago" (p. 398) in the form of the power PC theory (L. R. Novick & P. W. Cheng). This theory claims that people's goal in causal induction is to…

With respect to the often-present covariance between error terms of correlated variables, D. W. Zimmerman and R. H. Williams's (1977) adjusted correction for attenuation estimates the strength of the pairwise correlation between true scores without assuming independence of error scores. This article focuses on the derivation and analysis of…