Many factors influence students' reading practices. In the case of international students, home country educational practices and socio-cultural factors may pose a greater influence than for local students. This study reported here, part of a larger study, investigated the intertextual framing practices used in reading by a cohort of Thai…

Twenty-four students who scored 650 or more on the Scholastic Aptitude Test Mathematics test (SAT-M) were asked to think aloud while solving 13 mathematics items in either multiple-choice or free-response format. Strategies students used to solve the items were classified as either algorithmic or insightful. Data analyses indicated that items in…

By using ill-structured problems and examining problem- solving processes, this study was conducted to explore the nature of solving complex, multistep problems, focusing on how prior knowledge, problem-solving process utilization, and analogical problem solving are related to success. Twenty-four college students qualified to participate by…

The role of planning in the design of digital circuits was studied in two experiments. One compared the planning-related activities of expert designers and beginning students of design, and the other looked at the effect on circuit-design processes of forcing students to construct a global plan. In experiment 1, five undergraduate students…

This paper recognizes that critics of the "plain language movement" point out that what is "plain" to one audience may mystify and confuse another. It adds that questions such as "Plain language for whom?" and "How can we know whether a text is written in plain language?" raise legitimate concerns about the…

Students learning to program recursive LISP functions in a typical school-like lesson on recursion were observed. The typical lesson contains text and examples and involves solving a series of programming problems. The focus of this study is on students' learning strategies in new domains. In this light, a Soar computational model of…

Individual differences in performance on figural analogy tests are usually attributed to quantitative differences in processing parameters rather than to qualitative differences in the formation and use of representations. Yet aptitude-related differences in categorizing standardized figural analogy problems between high and low scorers have been…

This paper describes prominent cognitive psychology techniques and considers the extent to which these techniques are being used in instructional research studies reported in publications of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). Four techniques from cognitive psychology are described: secondary task techniques,…

The possibility of developing a learning theory that is designed to insure its relevance to educational problems is discussed. It is suggested that the constitutive problem for an educational psychology of learning is how one learns things that are difficult to learn. Behaviorist learning theories fail almost entirely to explain why anything is…

A study examined the effect of verbal reporting of students' thinking on their performance during an examination. Subjects, 343 high school seniors, were randomly divided into 4 experimental groups, and a different procedure for eliciting students' thinking during a critical thinking test was used for each group. A control group took the same test…

This report describes a methodology for using verbal reports of thinking to develop and validate multiple-choice tests of critical thinking. These verbal reports of individuals' thinking on draft items of multiple-choice critical thinking tests can be used systematically to provide evidence of the thinking processes elicited by such tests, and in…

Explores how a set of possible student misconceptions about solving a complex problem can be used in computer-based intelligent tutoring systems and in computer-based exercise and test generation. Topics discussed include expert systems, misconception covers, discrimination trees, methods of acquiring the set of misconceptions, and protocol…

An approach to functional vision evaluations clarifies the types of data collection and suggests protocols for three broad categories of visually handicapped children: "normal" school-age students, "normal" preschoolers, and multiply handicapped pupils. Visually impaired infants are classified with multiply handicapped pupils…

This paper discusses Web site usability issues. Specifically, it assumes that the usability of a Web site depends more on the perception of the user than on the objectively assessable usability criteria of the Web site. Two pilot studies, based on theoretical notions of uses and gratifications theory and similar theories, are presented. In the…

The effects of an author, writing in the first person, on adolescents reading history textbooks were studied with six high school sophomores. Data from think-aloud protocols and semi-structured interviews show that students interacted with the "visible" author and engaged in mental conversations. (SLD)