Learning and quality postsecondary education are critical for Canada's continued prosperity in today's global knowledge economy. Colleges and institutes have a pivotal role in postsecondary education in Canada by producing highly qualified graduates for direct entry into the labour market and facilitating transitions into further postsecondary…

Research is only beginning to show the benefits of the effective use of manipulatives with students who have disabilities. This article highlights how teachers can incorporate three manipulative instructional strategies to help students with high-incidence disabilities.

What is meant when people say that "learning environments are increasingly complex"? What is known about the cognitive processing that occurs during complex learning? How can educators provide effective instructional support for students who must learn and apply complex knowledge? These questions, and related issues, have fascinated educators and…

This paper describes the pedagogical principles that underpin the design of the Master of Engineering Practice, a distance education program offered by the University of Southern Queensland. This innovative program enables experienced engineering technologists to use their workplace learning to assemble portfolios that demonstrate their…

This article addresses the learning of second language (L2) writing skills to show how pictures can be used as an effective guided writing tool to facilitate students' writing process and to improve their writing proficiency. A study was conducted with 53 university students who had a prior knowledge of Spanish in secondary school. All students…

"Advances in Education Research" reprints previously published journal articles reporting on research supported in whole or in part by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI). The articles are selected from peer-reviewed/referred journals; the journals used are described briefy at the end of the volume. The articles in…

The purpose of this research study was to explore the effects of children's trade books on the development of science concepts. The two objectives of this exploratory study were to determine whether children's ideas about specific science concepts change when trade books containing information about those concepts are read to them, and…

The influences of a student's prior knowledge and desired goal on the difficulties and benefits associated with using hypertext were examined in this study. Participants, 12 students from an undergraduate course in educational psychology, were assigned to either the low or high prior knowledge category. Within these two groups, subjects were…

Researchers of computer ability have been largely influenced by the Galtonian perspective of intelligence assessment: a predominantly linear, construct-driven model based on identifying statistically determined factors. The use of this methodology, though, has far more to do with utility than theoretical rigor. Notably absent from this kind of…

The study investigated the role of a second language (L2) learner's prior cultural knowledge in target language lexical meaning-making. Comparison focuses on what important similarities in L2 lexical meaning-making of culturally loaded words appear among learners with the same ethnic background, and what important lexical meaning differences exist…

The rural school teacher needs to be certain that pupils are attaining the skills needed in reading to be successful in the world of work or postsecondary education. A major source of problems for rural pupils is that many lack background information in order to attach meaning to what is being read. Adequate attention must be given to pupils…

A study investigated the effects of a prior knowledge activation strategy on students' ability to successfully engage in the ongoing comprehension of extended text. Data were elicited from 79 ninth graders who were enrolled in a required social studies class in an urban high school in the Southeast. Equal numbers of high and low readers were…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of replacing multiple-choice and short-answer questions in programmed tutorial courseware practice interactions with learner-generated summaries on three types of verbal information learning outcomes. The study was designed to empirically investigate the claim that the level of mental processing…

The purpose of this study is twofold: (1) to examine teacher trainees' knowledge of teaching prior to training and its relationship to performance in the training program; and (2) to determine if there is a set of identifiable domain-specific knowledge related to course performance. Since trainees enter teacher training programs with prior…

This paper presents the results of a qualitative study of the interaction between computer assisted instruction (CAI) and cooperative learning. The constructivist perspective is discussed in relation to other learning theories, and is emphasized as the theoretical basis for the study because of its focus on prior learning, student characteristics,…