The present study investigated the effects of deductive and inductive teaching approaches to the acquisition of pragmatic competence on learners of English as a foreign language. In this study, 60 adult native speakers of Japanese with intermediate-level proficiency in English were each randomly assigned to 1 of 4 groups, which consisted of 3…

Students have continued to perform poorly in KCSE examinations in certain mathematics topics taught in secondary schools in Kenya. One such topic is commercial arithmetic. Successful teaching of mathematics depends partly on correct use of teaching methods in classroom settings. This study sought to examine how the use of advance organisers during…

In this study we examined the effects of online follow-up and online peer interaction following a face-to face professional development workshop on attitudes towards that professional development and completion of a professional development task. School librarians were invited to work online on a three page plan outlining interventions a library…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of the use of group works and demonstration experiments based on conceptual change approach in the elimination of misconception about the subject of photosynthesis and respiration in plants in pre-service science teachers. This study was conducted with 78 pre-service science teachers including…

The use of microworlds (MWs), or complex dynamic systems, in educational testing and personnel selection is hampered by systematic measurement errors because these new and innovative item formats are not adequately controlled for their difficulty. This empirical study introduces a way to operationalize an MW's difficulty and demonstrates the…

Background: A large proportion of children are exposed to more than one language, yet research on simultaneous bilingualism has been relatively sparse. Traditionally, there has been concern that bilingualism may aggravate language difficulties of children with language impairment. However, recent studies have not found specific language impairment…

Supplemental Educational Services (SES), a federally mandated program, is designed to raise student achievement via the implementation of tutoring programs. Unfortunately, although the SES federal legislation has been adopted by school districts nationally, relatively limited empirical evidence from rigorous research studies exists regarding the…

This study explored the impact of a group-as-a-whole processing group on 11 severely mentally ill adult clients residing in a long term care facility over 30 weeks. Participants were evaluated for the effect of the group on anxiety and depression, using the Beck Depression Index (BDI-II) and the Beck Anxiety Index (BAI). This longitudinal study…

In September 2005, the National Research Center on Learning Disabilities (NRCLD) sponsored an invitation-only forum to look closely at applying responsiveness to intervention (RTI) to specific learning disabilities (SLD) determination decisions. Thus far, research and school-based practices have perceived RTI as a prevention model focused on…

The present study investigated how anticipation of a target's appearance affects human attention to gaze cues provided by a schematic face. Subjects in a "catch" group received a high number of "catch" trials, in which no target stimulus appeared. Subjects in the control group did not receive any catch trials. As in previous studies, both groups…

A newly developed quantitative near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) system was used to measure changes in cortical hemoglobin oxygenation during the Verbal Fluency Task in 32 healthy controls, 15 subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and 15 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). The amplitude of changes in the waveform, which was…

Profile analysis was used to compare the study skills of academically struggling college students to their normal-achieving counter parts using the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI; Weinstein & Palmer, 2002). Comparisons were made between: (a) students with high versus low GPAs; (b) students with a documented learning disability…

Looking away from an interlocutor's face during demanding cognitive activity can help adults answer challenging arithmetic and verbal-reasoning questions (Glenberg, Schroeder, & Robertson, 1998). However, such "gaze aversion" (GA) is poorly applied by 5-year-old school children (Doherty-Sneddon, Bruce, Bonner, Longbotham, & Doyle, 2002). In…

The objective of this study was to assess the impact of a training programme, designed to make preschool-age children's invented spelling evolve, on their phonemic awareness. The participants were 90 children who were divided into 3 experimental and 3 control groups based on the nature of their invented spelling. Children's phonemic skills were…

A striking demonstration that sound-object correspondences are not completely arbitrary is that adults map nonsense words with rounded vowels (e.g. bouba) to rounded shapes and nonsense words with unrounded vowels (e.g. kiki) to angular shapes (Kohler, 1947; Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). Here we tested the bouba/kiki phenomenon in 2.5-year-old…