In the United Kingdom, the majority of national assessments involve human raters. The processes by which raters determine the scores to award are central to the assessment process and affect the extent to which valid inferences can be made from assessment outcomes. Thus, understanding rater cognition has become a growing area of research in the…

Prereading questions can be an effective tool for directing students' learning. However, it is not always clear what the online effects of a set of prereading questions will be. In two experiments, this study investigated whether readers direct additional attention to and learn more from sentences that are potentially relevant to a set of…

Challenging texts can be made accessible to students by increasing the level of instructional scaffolding. This article describes evidence-based models of shared reading that support reading development across the elementary years. Shared Reading Experience (Holdaway, 1982), Fluency-Oriented Reading Instruction (Stahl & Heubach, 2005),…

Inspired by Perkins' Theories of Difficulty concept, this exploratory study examined the learning patterns of graduate students as they grappled with using the style sheet of the American Psychological Association (APA). The researchers employed task performance analysis of three APA formatting tasks, interviews, and observation during a "think…

In an early think-aloud protocol study that identifies which "actual" written comments help students revise, Mary Hayes and Donald Daiker examine "how students respond to educators' responses". Studying teacher feedback in a writing course focused on revision, Hayes and Daiker asked students to read aloud and analyze their instructor's written…

This paper explores the relationship between the teaching of history (the academic study of the past) and the teaching of heritage (meaningful stories tying people to a collective past). The research was conducted in a Jewish high school whose explicit mission involves teaching history through a US history course and heritage through an Israeli…

Young children with autism spectrum disorder meet significant challenges in joint attention skills and in social communication. A child-centered, improvisational, music therapy intervention model was implemented to promote engagement in three young children with autism in a kindergarten classroom. A multiple baseline design compared the children's…

It has been common to use video records of instruction in teacher professional development, but participants have rarely been encouraged to evaluate teachers and students' actions in those records, allegedly because evaluation deters from the development of a professional discourse. In this study, we inspected teachers' online discussions of…

Background: This study is a part of a larger research project where the effect of instructional guidance in terms of role definition and role switching was investigated on students' learning of Basic Life Support (BLS) during a 20-minute reciprocal learning episode with task cards. BLS is a lifesaving skill consisting of nine sub skills to be…

This study investigated whether "findability," an aspect of usability, is an important component in student perceptions of/satisfaction with online courses and, as such, should be considered more heavily in online course design. Using standard usability testing measures, such as eye-tracking, time-on-task, and think-alouds, participants…

Communication partners who efficiently use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) are essential interaction partners for children learning to communicate using AAC. This systematic review examines studies targeting interventions designed to help communication partners support children with complex communication needs who use AAC.…

Teacher language and students' on-task behavior were examined in language arts lessons with and without classroom drama in two self-contained third grade classrooms for students with learning disabilities and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Language arts lessons that integrated classroom drama were associated with significantly higher…

This study examined the effects of audio and video self-recording on preservice teachers' written reflections. Participants (n = 201) came from a secondary teaching methods course and its school-based (clinical) fieldwork. The audio group (n[subscript A] = 106) used audio recorders to monitor their teaching in fieldwork placements; the video group…

Elicitation techniques are a category of research tasks that use visual, verbal, or written stimuli to encourage participants to talk about their ideas. These tasks are particularly useful for exploring topics that may be difficult to discuss in formal interviews, such as those that involve sensitive issues or rely on tacit knowledge. Elicitation…

Technology continues to shift the definition of what it means to be literate. As literacy educators in teacher preparation programs, we must consider how emerging and mobile technology may be used within coursework to not only create multiple ways to conceptualize teaching 21st century literacy, but also as a professional imperative. This article…