Foreign-accented speech is generally harder to understand than native-accented speech. This difficulty is reduced for non-native listeners who share their first language with the non-native speaker. It is currently unclear, however, how non-native listeners deal with foreign-accented speech produced by speakers of a different language. We show…

Children have difficulty comprehending novel verbs in the double object dative (e.g., "Fred blicked the dog a stick") as compared to the prepositional dative (e.g., "Fred blicked a stick to the dog"). We explored this pattern with 3 and 4 year olds (N = 60). In Experiment 1, we replicated the documented difficulty with the…

In this study we present a picture database of 160 nouns and 160 verbs. All verbs and nouns are divided into two groups as action and non-action words. Age of acquisition, familiarity, imageability, name agreement and complexity norms are reported alongside frequency, word length and morpheme count for each word. Data were collected from 600…

This study tests the theoretical predictions regarding effects of increasing task complexity (Robinson, 2001a, 2001b, 2007, 2010; Robinson & Gilabert, 2007) for second language (L2) pronunciation. Specifically, we examine whether more complex tasks (a) lead to greater incidence of pronunciation-focused language-related episodes (LREs) and (b)…

In an undergraduate introductory biology laboratory course, we used a summative assessment to directly test the learning objective that students will be able to apply course material to increasingly novel and complex situations. Using a factorial framework, we developed multiple true-false questions to fall along axes of novelty and complexity,…

This study was designed to address cognitive overload issues through the use of visual cueing as a means to enhance learning. While there has been significant research such as use of color for cueing to address many of the cited problems, there are missing elements in this research that could go a long way toward designing more effective solutions…

The present study investigates the best factor for controlling the item difficulty of multiple-choice English vocabulary questions generated by an automatic question generation system. Three factors are considered for controlling item difficulty: (1) reading passage difficulty, (2) semantic similarity between the correct answer and distractors,…

This document provides guidance on the research, policies, and practices necessary for appropriate development and implementation of student growth goals, which are often referred to as Student Learning Objectives (SLOs). Over the past few years, federal and state education policies have shifted to require teachers to set SLOs with the intention…

Research within the Cognitive load theory (CLT) framework typically assumes motivation as a precursor to learning, rather than an outcome of instruction. In this study, we observe changes in learners' motivational beliefs as outcomes of their cognitive processes, through CLT lens. Using double-blind quasi-experimental design, we manipulate the…

Theories of study time allocation and of curiosity suggest that people are most engaged with and want to devote their time to materials that are not completely mastered but also are not so difficult that they might be impossible. Their curiosity is thought to be triggered by items that are almost known, or are in what is sometimes called theregion…

This article examines whether the way that PISA models item outcomes in mathematics affects the validity of its country rankings. As an alternative to PISA methodology a two-parameter model is applied to PISA mathematics item data from Canada and Finland for the year 2012. In the estimation procedure item difficulty and dispersion parameters are…

After explicit instruction on how to give possible bidirectional (two-way) causality explanations for a correlation, 240 students from eight sections of social psychology and research methods courses wrote "reverse causality" explanations on various test questions, creating a total of 882 answers. Averaging across multiple graded…

We compared college students' learning from, and perceptions of, print and digital readings, with the goal of providing an informed recommendation for students and educators regarding best approaches for reading assignments. To add to the literature, we focused on a common experience in college -- reading an educational article -- in addition to…

High-achieving students' work-alone preference has been shown to be largely false and to depend on the learning context. However, the literature has not distinguished preferences from expectations, nor directly examined what students expect will occur in classroom group work. An attempt to systematically review group-work expectations yielded just…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have become increasingly common in recent years. As the main component of MOOCs, instructional videos play a significant role in students' learning. This study builds on the extant research on multimedia learning by testing the impact of teachers' continuous vs. intermittent presence in procedural knowledge…