A central factor in research guided by the Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) is the mental effort people invest in performing a task. Mental effort is commonly assessed by asking people to report their effort throughout performing, learning, or problem-solving tasks. Although this measurement is considered reliable and valid in CLT research,…

Multimedia instruction, the combination of pictures and words to produce meaningful learning, involves attention, selection, organization, and integration of new information with previously learned information. Because there is a large, theory-based literature supporting the effectiveness of multimedia instruction, we proposed that multimedia…

Metamemory refers to the metacognitive awareness of one's own memory status. Previous research has shown that item value plays a dominant role in self-regulated study (e.g., strategic choices regarding when, what, and how to study). In spite of extensive research on the effects of item value on in learners' study behaviour, less is known about the…

This article identifies and unpacks three key decision points in a systematic mixed research synthesis, a mixed methods approach to research synthesis. The research community has increasingly recognized the value of synthesis studies in expanding our understanding of phenomena. Mixed-methodology broadly has also gained ground as a pragmatic…

Many online videos feature an instructor on the screen to improve learners' engagement; however, the influence of this design on learners' cognitive load is underexplored. This study investigates the effects of instructor presence on learners' processing of information using both subjective and psychophysiological measures of cognitive load. Sixty…

Psychophysiological responses have been studied as objective indicators for measuring a learner's cognitive load. Previous studies have correlated pupil dilation or fixation length with increased cognitive load. Our aims were to confirm whether these findings could be applied in a general learning context and to verify the additivity hypothesis of…

Ensure all learners have opportunities to engage deeply in meaningful intellectual work. In "Ambitious Instruction," author Brad Cawn offers a blueprint for how to make rigor visible, accessible, and actionable in grade 6-12 classrooms. The resource guides readers toward using the twin tenets of problem-based learning and synthesis to…

This study used corpus-based methodology to analyze what, if any, differences exist in the linguistic complexity of EdD and PhD dissertations in Educational Leadership. The study is conceptually framed around language variation within discipline and genre. The corpus created for this study, DISSCORP, was comprised of 200 dissertations, 100 EdD and…

The Rasch model is commonly used to calibrate multiple choice items. However, the sample sizes needed to estimate the Rasch model can be difficult to attain (e.g., consider a small testing company trying to pretest new items). With small sample sizes, auxiliary information besides the item responses may improve estimation of the item parameters.…

Secondary piano and music theory are typically taught in two parallel and required sequences within the Undergraduate Music Major curriculum. The overlapping concepts presented in these sequences provide frequent opportunities for mutual reinforcement; however, due to a variety of issues, course content is not always aligned across theory and…

The objective of this dissertation was to explore the paradoxical nature of Combinatorics as both a difficult and accessible domain in Mathematics, particularly for K-12 students. This paradox in Combinatorics' nature raised questions about how students interact with problems in this domain and the factors influencing their understanding and…

This study is aimed to identify the effects of task complexity on first language (L1) use and the functions it may serve when two groups of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) work on collaborative tasks. Twenty-four pairs of Chinese EFL learners from two universities were assigned to a lower-proficiency and a higher-proficiency group,…

The attribution of learning success or failure is crucial for students' learning and motivation. Effective attribution of their learning success or failure in the context of a small private online course (SPOC) could generate students' motivation toward learning success while an incorrect attribution would lead to a sense of helplessness. Based on…

Graded reading is one of the important ways of English learning. How to automatically judge and grade the difficulty of the English reading corpus is of great significance for precision teaching and personalized learning. However, the current rule-based readability assessment methods have some limitations, such as low efficiency and poor accuracy.…

Studies relating to the vocabulary items within EFL textbooks have revealed a divergence from well-researched wordlists such as the New General Service List (NGSL) (Browne et al., 2013), and the BNC/COCA wordlist (Nakayama, 2022; Sun and Dang, 2020). In Japan, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) recently…