We compared how 8 religious believers (historians and clergy) and 8 skeptics (historians and scientists) read a series of documents on 2 topics: the Biblical Exodus and the origins of the first (American) Thanksgiving. Readings by religiously committed historians differed from those of their non-religious peers. Navigating between the competing…

This study employed an eye-tracking technique to examine students' visual attention when solving a multiple-choice science problem. Six university students participated in a problem-solving task to predict occurrences of landslide hazards from four images representing four combinations of four factors. Participants' responses and visual attention…

Researchers assert that the metacognitive nature of think-aloud pair problem solving (TAPPS) improves students' problem solving by focusing their attention on their own thinking. The purpose of this study was to identify and describe oral verbalizations indicating cognitive processes of secondary-level career and technical education students who…

Increasingly, multi-representational educational technologies are being deployed in science classrooms to support science learning and the development of representational competence. Several studies have indicated that students experience significant challenges working with these multi-representational displays and prefer to use only one…

This article seeks to illuminate the gap between UK policy and practice in relation to the use of criteria for allocating grades. It critiques criterion-referenced grading from three perspectives. Twelve lecturers from two universities were asked to "think aloud" as they graded two written assignments. The study found that assessors made…

This exploratory study highlights certain differences in the way an expert and a novice engineer used their analyzing and generating skills while solving a fairly ill-structured design problem. The expert tends to use more inferences and elaboration when solving the design problem and the novice tend to use analysis that is focused on the…

In some higher education courses that focus on case studies, teachers can provide situated scenarios (such as business bottlenecks and medical cases) and problem-solving discussion tasks for students to promote their cognitive skills. There is limited research on the content, performance, and behavioral patterns of teaching using online…

Mathematics classroom coaching is used across the United States as a means for improving instruction, with the ultimate goal of improving student learning. The job assignments of coaches can vary widely across schools and districts. Regardless of the various forms that coaching can take, there is the consistent expectation that a coach's…

This multiple case study examined the reflections of elementary teachers as they taught science to English language learners (ELLs). The six participants in this study developed explanations about their science teaching with ELLs as they engaged in reflective practice using video-based tools during a professional development experience. Open…

Shared reading is a common practice in preschool classrooms and is purported to develop oral language, print concepts, and listening comprehension. The actual practice of reading aloud differed greatly among observed classrooms resulting in variations in potential positive effects. This study examines the potential effects of professional…

This paper reports on two projects which investigated graded readers (GRs) as meaningful input for learners of Japanese as a foreign language (JFL). Project One examined the intentions of six writers of Japanese GRs. A focus group interview demonstrated that the writers had a genuine communicative intent in the writing process. Project Two…

Classroom emotional climates (ECs) are interrelated with students' engagement with university courses. Despite growing interest in emotions and EC research, little is known about the ways in which social interactions and different subject matter mediate ECs in preservice science teacher education classes. In this study we investigated the EC…

In classrooms tests, students are regularly required to demonstrate their understanding of mathematical concepts. When children encounter problems in demonstrating such understanding, it is often not clear whether this is because of the language of the teachers' questions and instructions or a genuine non-understanding of the concept itself. This…

The important but little understood problem that motivated this study was the lack of research on valid assessment methods to determine progress in higher-order learning in situations involving complex and ill-structured problems. Without a valid assessment method, little progress can occur in instructional design research with regard to designing…

This study used think-aloud methodology to explore undergraduates' spontaneous attention to and use of source information while reading six documents that presented conflicting views on a controversial social scientific issue in a Google-like environment. Results showed that students explicitly and implicitly paid attention to sources of documents…