In this exploratory study, we designed and validated game-based performance tasks to assess the development of representational flexibility in autistic adolescents through virtual reality (VR)-based training. Representational flexibility, a critical cognitive ability, involves attention switching, generating representations, and recognizing…

Generative AI (GenAI) has the potential to revolutionize the analysis of educational data, significantly impacting learning analytics (LA). This study explores the capability of non-experts, including administrators, instructors, and students, to effectively use GenAI for descriptive LA tasks without requiring specialized knowledge in data…

The acceptance of Fourth Industrial Revolution technology for teaching and learning during the pandemic lockdown suggests that a significant portion of educational interactions will shift online shortly. However, the suitability of this technology for inquiry-based learning requires further investigation. This study aimed to assess the…

Manding is an important skill for children to learn to access not only preferred items but also information that can be crucial to their success in academic, professional, or social settings. There is a need to continue research to best teach mands for information. The current study examined the effectiveness of using incidental teaching to teach…

Recent accounts of social difficulties in autism suggest that autistic and non-autistic individuals mutually misunderstand each other. This assumption aligns with findings that mixed-neurotype interactions are less efficient than same-neurotype interactions. However, it remains unclear whether different outcomes between mixed- and same-neurotype…

Purpose: Pitch perception is important for speech sound learning, and reading acquisition requires integration of speech sounds and written letters. Many individuals with dyslexia exhibit auditory perception deficits that may therefore contribute to their reading impairment given that complex pitch perception is crucial for categorizing speech…

In this study, we compared the effectiveness of two instructional approaches--modeling and generative tasks--within case-based instruction (CBI) in developing preservice teachers' classroom case analysis skills. Forty preservice teachers were randomly assigned to engage in CBI with either a modeling or generative task, working through three…

Background and Aims: The aim of the current study is to assess the validity of the Cross-linguistic lexical task (CLT) against direct and indirect measures of lexical skills across 2-6 years of age, for a crucial period of lexical development. In addition to evaluating relationships between measures at the level of total score, we also explored…

In Canada, the federally funded Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) program follows a task-based language teaching (TBLT) approach using the Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLB). Aligned with other communicative language approaches, TBLT de-emphasizes systematic instruction of the morpho-syntactic elements of language. Although TBLT…

Critical thinking is routinely identified as a goal for student learning in higher education. Critical thinking, however, is difficult to define or teach, often left as an educational aspiration that is challenging to operationalize and assess. Therefore, many interventions targeting critical thinking are isolated and tend to focus on the…

In elementary school classrooms, Computational Thinking (CT) teaching often is embedded in problem- or project-based pedagogies and involves programming using Educational Robotics. Little is known, however, about how children solve problems in these contexts, and how task designs influence which CT and problem-solving processes they apply. In this…

Academic task completion is essential to success in school, and academic activity across individuals appears to be maintained by different variables. The purpose of this study was to assess variables that might promote higher or lower levels of academic engagement. Participants were six general education students in elementary school, and academic…

At conceptual and linguistic levels of cognition, events are said to be represented in terms of abstract categories, for example, the sentence "Jackie cut the bagel with a knife" encodes the categories Agent (i.e., "Jackie") and Patient (i.e., "the bagel"). In this paper, we ask whether entities such as "the…

Existing research demonstrates that pre-decisional information sampling strategies are often stable within a given person while varying greatly across people. However, it remains largely unknown what drives these individual differences, that is, why in some circumstances we collect information more idiosyncratically. In this brief report, we…

This paper demonstrates that a teachable agent (TA) can play a dual role in an online learning environment (OLE) for learning by teaching--the teachable agent working as a synthetic peer for students to learn by teaching and as an interactive tool for cognitive task analysis when authoring an OLE for learning by teaching. We have developed an OLE…