Readability has long been regarded as a significant aspect in English language teaching as it provides the overall picture of a text's difficulty level, especially in the context of teaching and testing. Readability is a practical consideration when making decisions on materials to match a text with target readers' proficiency. However, few…

In comparison with younger children, older students tend to be less motivated to read. A literature class that fails to motivate students is one aspect that has often been discussed in this regard. Using data from 405 German ninth graders, we examined how students' book reading is related to intrinsic situational and intrinsic habitual reading…

Online testing is a popular practice for tertiary educators, largely owing to efficiency in automation, scalability, and capability to add depth and breadth to subject offerings. As with all assessments, designs need to consider whether student cheating may be inadvertently made easier and more difficult to detect. Cheating can jeopardise the…

Aiming to enhance understanding of visual obstacles inherent in two-dimensional (2-D) sketches used in high school spatial geometry instruction, we propose a measure of visual difficulty based on two attributes of the sketches: potentially misleading geometrical information (PMI) and potentially helpful geometrical information (PHI). The…

Background: Concerns about health inequalities experienced by people with intellectual disability (ID) have led to many health information materials being created in an "Easy Read" format. This study aimed to understand the practices involved in making information accessible. Methods: Individual, pair and group interviews were conducted…

In a classic 2010 article, Craig Nelson critiques his own previously held "dysfunctional illusions of rigor" that for years had constrained his teaching. He demonstrates that certain "rigorous" pedagogical practices disadvantage rather than support learners, and he argues for an expansion of what counts as legitimate…

This paper aims to advance our understanding of how children's use of vocabulary in writing changes as they progress through their school careers. It examines the extent to which a model of lexical sophistication as use of low-frequency, register-appropriate words adequately captures development in vocabulary use across the course of compulsory…

Calls for empirical investigations of the Common Core standards (CCSSs) for English Language Arts have been widespread, particularly in the area of text complexity in the primary grades (e.g., Hiebert & Mesmer "Educational Research," 42(1), 44-51, 2013). The CCSSs mention that qualitative methods (such as Fountas and Pinnell) and…

Enrolments in STEM disciplines at universities are increasing globally, attributed to the greater life opportunities open to students as a result of a STEM education. But while institutional access to STEM programmes is widening, the retention and success of STEM undergraduate students remains a challenge. Pedagogies that support student success…

The purpose of this study was to shed light on the cognitive processes underlying the expertise reversal effect related to multimedia signaling. Multimedia signals highlight correspondences between text and pictures, which is supposed to support text-picture integration and thus learning from multimedia. Previous research suggests that learners'…

The aim of the present study (n = 113) was to examine how (objective and subjective) information on peers' preparation, confidence, and past performance can support students in answering correctly in audience response systems (aka clickers). The result analysis shows that in the "challenging" questions, in which answers diverged,…

Research suggests that the three-option format is optimal for multiple choice questions (MCQs). This conclusion is supported by numerous studies showing that most distractors (i.e., incorrect answers) are selected by so few examinees that they are essentially nonfunctional. However, nearly all studies have defined a distractor as nonfunctional if…

Despite the wide use of peer assessment, questions about the helpfulness of peer feedback are frequently raised. In particular, it is unknown whether, how and to what extent peer feedback can help solve problems in initial texts in complex writing tasks. We investigated this research gap by focusing on the case of writing literature reviews in an…

Executing actions in a specific order is a critical component of many action sequences that children must acquire, the majority of which are learned through observation and imitation of others. Although a wealth of evidence indicates that children can process and represent temporal order in memory, relatively little is known about the development…

Massive open online courses are one of the most prominent trends in higher education in recent years. Instructional videos play a significant role in the massive open online courses platform. This study tested the impact of sending danmaku related to video content versus sending danmaku not related to video content versus not sending danmaku in…