Serious games, many of which are multi-player games, have been commonly used in information technology education and training. Competition can be intuitively associated with games; however, it is not always considered as a necessary attribute of serious games. Particularly, the learning impact results of competition are mixed. Challenge and…

Research focusing on the complexities faced by instructional designers have called for pedagogical strategies to equip instructional designers with the ability to problem solve and make decisions. One of the most widely studied strategies for managing cognitive load is the use of worked examples, which provides an alternative to traditional…

Creative thinking shares many characteristics with traditional complex tasks. We investigated whether implicit theories of creativity would affect creative thinking in a way similar to the impact of implicit theories of intelligence on academic tasks. We altered participants' theories of creativity to be either more incremental or more…

Cognitive load theory is one of the most influential theoretical explanations of cognitive processing during learning. Despite its success, attempts to assess cognitive load during learning have proven difficult. Therefore, in the current study, students' self-reported cognitive load after the problem- solving process has been combined with…

Self-rated mental effort has been and continues to be the most widely used measure of cognitive load. This single-item measure is often used as a predictor variable in linear models for predicting performance or some other response variable. While an advantage of linear models is that they are fairly easy to understand, they fall short when the…

This study examined the impact of noise on cognitive performance in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), while concurrently measuring sympathetic responses. Adolescents with and without ASD completed visually presented span tasks in a 2 × 2 experimental manipulation of noise (quiet vs. 75 dB gated broadband noise) and task difficulty (easier vs.…

Random sampling and random allocation are essential processes in the practice of inferential statistics. These processes ensure that all members of a population are equally likely to be selected, and that all possible allocations in an experiment are equally likely. It is these characteristics that allow the validity of the subsequent calculations…

Math anxiety -- negative feelings towards math -- is hypothesized to be associated with the avoidance of math-related activities such as taking math courses and pursuing STEM careers. Surprisingly, however, there is little experimental evidence for the math anxiety- avoidance link. Such evidence is important for formulating how to break this…

The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions of undergraduate agricultural students on the cognitive and emotional processes produced after exposure to low- and high-level questions, as well as the effects of post-question wait-time to determine the benefits of differing lengths of post-question wait-time based on the level of…

Research on instructional design provides inconsistent results on the use of game elements in cognitive tasks or learning. Cognitive load theory suggests that game elements increase extraneous cognitive load and, thus, may distract the users. In contrast, from an emotional design perspective, the use of game elements is argued to increase…

Syntactic complexity has been recognized as an important construct in writing research, and for the past five decades, many syntactic complexity measures (SCMs) have been examined in numerous studies. This systematic review is the first study of its kind to synthesize 36 studies spanning from 1970 to 2019 by identifying and cataloging all SCMs…

Retrieval practice has been widely studied as an effective strategy for enhancing memory. In this review article, we discuss how its effects on learning complex problem-solving procedures are less straightforward, however, with repeated studying of worked examples sometimes more effective than problem-solving practice. This worked example benefit…

A consistent finding in the Stroop literature is that congruency effects (i.e., the color-naming latency difference between words presented in incongruent vs. congruent colors) are larger for mostly-congruent items (e.g., the word RED presented most often in red) than for mostly-incongruent items (e.g., the word GREEN presented most often in…

This study explored the effects of prior knowledge and cueing on the learning (retention, transfer, and matching) and mental effort of learners who studied an instructional animation with accompanying narration about photosynthesis. A 4 × 2 between-subjects factorial design with four levels of cueing (no cueing, label cueing, picture cueing, and…

Understanding is one of the four key proficiencies in the "Australian Curriculum: Mathematics" and arguably the pivot on which mathematics depends. This case study investigated preservice teachers' understanding and ability to articulate some measurement concepts. Data were gathered from 23 preservice teachers who voluntarily…