In an immersive virtual reality (IVR) environment, this study investigated: (1) the role of learner characteristics in various learning and psychological outcomes, including knowledge retention, perceived learning, cognitive load, self-efficacy, enjoyment, presence, and usefulness; and (2) the relationship among these intended outcomes. Forty…

Computerized assessments and digital games have become more prevalent in childhood, necessitating a systematic investigation of the effects of gamified executive function assessments on performance and engagement. This study examined the feasibility of incorporating gamification and a machine learning algorithm that adapts task difficulty to…

Transition is about change, and change comes with its challenges. School transitions are challenging events in students' educational paths, with possible negative effects on their development. The transition from middle school to high school is one of the most difficult, generating many school dropouts. Recovering from disrupted educational…

We use student-level administrative data from Delaware for 43,767 high school students across five 12th grade cohorts from 2017 to 2021. We apply Item Response Theory (IRT) to high school transcript data, treating courses as items and grades as ordered responses, to estimate both student transcript strength ([theta]) and course difficulty. We…

Lying is assumed to increase cognitive load, and it has been shown to slow response times to simple questions. We employed a dual-task methodology, the detection response task (DRT), to assess cognitive load in telling narrative lies in a live, open-question interview. The DRT requires participants to press a button in response to a tactile…

Lying requires a long-term memory search and is a cognitive load task. Telling a spontaneous lie is associated with a higher cognitive load compared with the truth, although when memories are planned before telling a lie, the cognitive load can be less compared with the truth; therefore, telling a spontaneous lie could be associated with a higher…

The goal of this study was to characterise how third-grade primary school students understand the concept of polygon as well as relationships between polygons. Following a teaching experiment, students answered a questionnaire on the recognition of polygons and relationships between polygons, providing information about how a polygon was…

The basic cognitive skill of numeracy is a recognized form of human capital, associated with economic and social well being for individuals and for nations. In this study, we explore how occupational complexity relates to proficiency in numeracy, among adults in full-time employment. We operationalize occupational complexity by constructing three…

Humans tend to avoid cognitive effort. Whereas evidence of this abounds in adults, little is known about its emergence and development in childhood. The few existing studies in children use different experimental paradigms and report contradictory developmental patterns. We examined effort-related decision-making in a sample of 79 five- to…

In this work, we consider learning analytics for primary and secondary schools from the perspective of the designer of a learning system. We provide an overview of practically useful analytics techniques with descriptions of their applications and specific illustrations. We highlight data biases and caveats that complicate the analysis and its…

Background: Despite evidence that high levels of anxiety can impair Working Memory (WM) functioning, little is known about how anxiety is associated with classroom learning activities, which make high demands on verbal WM. Aims: To investigate the association between anxiety and learning on a task which makes high demands on verbal WM. Sample:…

A key consideration when giving any computerized adaptive test (CAT) is how much adaptation is present when the test is used in practice. This study introduces a new framework to measure the amount of adaptation of Rasch-based CATs based on looking at the differences between the selected item locations (Rasch item difficulty parameters) of the…

The disambiguation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence in favor of a less preferred parse can lead to slower reading at the disambiguation point. This phenomenon, referred to as a garden-path effect, has motivated models in which readers initially maintain only a subset of the possible parses of the sentence, and subsequently require…

Item response theory provides various important advantages for exams carried out or to be carried out digitally. For computerized adaptive tests to be able to make valid and reliable predictions supported by IRT, good quality item pools should be used. This study examines how adaptive test applications vary in item pools which consist of items…

This study assessed the combined effects of students' achievement goal orientations (performance-approach goal and mastery-approach goal) and contextual factors (goal structures and task difficulty) on their performance. Researchers first asked 313 junior students about their achievement goal orientations and then randomly assigned them to one of…