Educators' support when using informational text in kindergarten is foundational to children's comprehension and future learning. Prior research has not offered clear insight into their help when children experience difficulties during informational text comprehension instruction. The current study examined one kindergarten educator's support.…

To ensure that student academic growth in a subject area is accurately captured, it is imperative that the underlying scale remains stable over time. As item parameter stability constitutes one of the factors that affects scale stability, NWEA® periodically conducts studies to check for the stability of the item parameter estimates for MAP®…

The Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy partnered with The Boston Foundation to examine and document the school-level practices that have enabled high growth and high academic achievement at the Pioneer Charter School of Science II, the winner of the 2021 Pozen Prize for Innovative Schools. The Rennie Center began with a review of…

There is an increased demand on nursing faculty to provide quality teaching and assessment. Nursing faculty are required to ensure accurate assessment of learning through testing and outcome measurement that are critical elements of the evaluation process. Likewise, nursing faculty should implement a logical evaluation system. However, the…

How can we improve the instructional effectiveness of an online slideshow lesson? In the present study, college students received a 12-slide multimedia slideshow lesson on how a geographic information system works. In a 2 × 2 design, the lesson was presented one complete slide at a time (large segment) or added one section of the slide at a time…

Word problems embed a math equation within a short narrative. Due to their structure, both numerical and linguistic factors can contribute to problem difficulty. The present studies explored the role of irrelevant information in word problems, to determine whether its negative impact is due to numerical (foregrounding hypothesis) or linguistic…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to find appropriate forms of analysis of multiple-choice questions (MCQ) to obtain an assessment method, as fair as possible, for the students. The authors intend to ascertain if it is possible to control the quality of the MCQ contained in a bank of questions, implemented in Moodle, presenting some evidence…

In educational contexts, questioning performs a number of functions. These include facilitating learning in the classroom and the recognition of achievement through examinations and other assessments. Good quality questions are important to ensuring that these functions are achieved. This research focused on educational exams and used views from…

This coda article offers unified theoretical accounts of the major findings of the empirical studies in this special issue of "Optimizing Second Language Practice in the Classroom: Perspectives from Cognitive Psychology." We present a theoretical framework from cognitive psychology (desirable difficulty framework) and link it to the…

The cognitive relationship between intuition and proof is complex and often students struggle when they need to find mathematical justifications to explain what appears as self-evident. In this paper, we address this complexity in the specific case of open geometrical problems that ask for a conjecture and its proof. We analyze four meaningful…

The "cold open" is a literary technique that can be usefully adapted for management education, particularly as an opening exercise on the first day of class. Specifically, this approach includes presenting a carefully chosen problem to the class without preamble, providing students an opportunity to work on the problem, and perhaps most…

One of the golden rules in instructional design methods is to optimize the use of working memory capacity and avoid cognitive overload. The study of cognitive load has historically relied on one's introspection. However, it is difficult to capture changes in cognitive load levels during learning sensitively. This paper suggests an approach to…

SQL query writing is a challenging task for novices, even after considerable training. Query writing is a programming task and a translation task where the writer must translate a user's request for information into code that conforms to the structure, constraints, and syntax of an SQL SELECT statement and that references specific tables and…

The purposes of this research are: 1) to compare two equalizing tests conducted with Hebara and Stocking Lord method; 2) to describe the characteristics of each equalizing test method using windows' IRTEQ program. This research employs a participatory approach as the data are collected through questionnaires based on the National Examination…

Does the contribution of children during the design process help graphic designers to create more efficient learning tools? In order to answer this research question, an experiment using both the user-centred design method and a traditional design method (without users' consultancy) was conducted. The aim of this study was to verify whether the…