University Malaya enrolls students from all states in Malaysia as well as a small number of students from overseas. The objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of past performance on students at three faculties, namely, Faculty of Economics and Administration(FEA), Faculty of Business and Accounting(FBA) and Faculty of Arts and Social…

Decades of education research have shown that students can simultaneously possess alternate knowledge frameworks and that the development and use of such knowledge are context dependent. As a result of extensive qualitative research, standardized multiple-choice tests such as Force Concept Inventory and Force-Motion Concept Evaluation tests…

Writing can be a powerful tool for learning biology. Writing assignments in biology could help students personalize and understand the biology knowledge they are studying. In this article, the authors present the "Botanical Sense of Place" (BSP), a convenient and easy-to-use writing template that they developed to elicit and probe students' prior…

Children arrive in classrooms with varied background knowledge, which means that teachers must select instructional methods, materials, and techniques to meet multiple needs. A carefully planned approach that includes direct and explicit instruction--as well as extensive opportunities for reading, writing, speaking, and listening--can help…

Listening comprehension is a difficult skill for foreign language learners to develop and for their teachers to assess. In designing suitable listening tests, teachers can provide various forms of support to reduce the demands of the task for the test takers. This study investigated the effects of four types of listening support: previewing the…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the nature of reading comprehension processes while reading on the Internet. Eleven sixth-grade students with the highest combination of standardized reading scores, reading report card grades, and Internet reading experiences were selected from a population of 150 sixth graders in three…

Case-based methodology has been a staple of teacher education coursework for many years. However, commercial case studies do not always meet specific teacher candidates' needs or match their experiences in school settings. Teacher educators in an Early Childhood program in a midwestern university developed an innovative use of case-based…

This study compares middle schools to K-8 schools, as well as to newly formed K-8 schools that are part of a K-8 conversion policy. The outcome is student achievement, and our sample includes 40,883 eighth-grade students from 95 schools across five cohorts. The analysis uses multilevel modeling to account for student, cohort, and school-level…

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…