When the International Society for Language Studies (ISLS) was founded in 2002 and the journal that is now "Critical Inquiry in Language Studies (CILS)" was in the planning stages, we recognized a need for an interdisciplinary, or perhaps even transdisciplinary (see Kaufman, Moss, & Osborn, 2003), venue for the publication of research on language…

The current study investigated how computer games and maps compare as preparation for readers to comprehend and retain spatial relations in text narratives. Readers create situation models of five dimensions: spatial, temporal, causal, goal, and protagonist (Zwaan, Langston, & Graesser 1995). Of these five, readers mentally model the spatial…

Students write papers in many of their courses to improve their writing skills and to foster an active attitude toward learning. Every year, they hand in hundreds of papers for teachers to assess. This stream may get polluted in two ways: by simple copying from Internet sources and by the exchange of text fragments between students. These…

The Forest Hills Local Schools board in Ohio had always been supportive of a 1-to-1 program, but it simply did not have the resources to buy every student a computer. The district had some laptops available, but only enough for about one out of every five students. So, when a teacher wanted to integrate technology into a lesson, the machines had…

New special education teachers (SETs) face some typical challenges as well as ones that are specific to their particular work settings. Providing support that addresses teachers' unique needs is important for increasing their effectiveness, helping them make a smooth entry into teaching, and reducing their stress and turnover. Nearly 20 years ago,…

Online assessments are essential parts of online learning. There are some debates on quality of online assessments. Nevertheless the study considered online exams as an instructional activity and aimed to examine the effects of online exams on students' engagements related to course goals. The study was conducted on two cases, which are…

Technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) has been advanced as a construct to describe teachers' understandings related to effectively teaching with technology. This study examined the development of TPACK of two teachers during their mathematics teaching after participating in a learner-centered professional development (LCPD)…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of using cognitive and metacognitive prompting strategies in a web-based learning environment to engage college students in a complex, ill-structured task. The course context was a freshman/sophomore level Information Sciences and Technology course, and the topic was web design. Four…

Changing nature of student population, developments in technology, and insufficient number of traditional universities have made online courses popular around the globe. This study was designed to investigate the current practices of teaching mathematics online in Turkish Universities through a qualitative inquiry. The snowball sampling method was…

Microblogging is a popular technology in social networking applications that lets users publish online short text messages (e.g., less than 200 characters) in real time via the web, SMS, instant messaging clients, etc. Microblogging can be an effective tool in the classroom and has lately gained notable interest from the education community. This…

Social bookmarking has gained popularity since the advent of Web 2.0. Keywords known as tags are created to annotate web content, and the resulting tag space composed of the tags, the resources, and the users arises as a new platform for web content discovery. Useful and interesting web resources can be located through searching and browsing based…

The term "orchestration", has been used to describe the teacher's role in activity settings incorporating interactive technologies. This musical analogy suggests pre-planned manipulation of events to generate "performance" leading to learning. However, in two recent projects we have observed how effective teaching and learning…

This article describes how a demonstration of statistical (or other) software can be recorded without expensive video equipment and saved as a presentation to be displayed with software such as Microsoft PowerPoint. Work carried out on a tablet PC, for example, can also be recorded in this fashion.

This experiment investigated how two factors which relate to icon representations affected Taiwanese computer users. These were: alphabetic or non alphabetic representations and cultural or standard imagery. Alphabetic representations are representations which show Chinese characters or English words/letters. Non alphabetic representations are…

Videogames are a powerful medium that curriculum designers can use to create narratively rich worlds for achieving educational goals. In these worlds, youth can become scientists, doctors, writers, and mathematicians who critically engage complex disciplinary content to transform a virtual world. Toward illuminating this potential, the authors…