This paper aims to advance our understanding of how children's use of vocabulary in writing changes as they progress through their school careers. It examines the extent to which a model of lexical sophistication as use of low-frequency, register-appropriate words adequately captures development in vocabulary use across the course of compulsory…

Calls for empirical investigations of the Common Core standards (CCSSs) for English Language Arts have been widespread, particularly in the area of text complexity in the primary grades (e.g., Hiebert & Mesmer "Educational Research," 42(1), 44-51, 2013). The CCSSs mention that qualitative methods (such as Fountas and Pinnell) and…

Enrolments in STEM disciplines at universities are increasing globally, attributed to the greater life opportunities open to students as a result of a STEM education. But while institutional access to STEM programmes is widening, the retention and success of STEM undergraduate students remains a challenge. Pedagogies that support student success…

The purpose of this study was to shed light on the cognitive processes underlying the expertise reversal effect related to multimedia signaling. Multimedia signals highlight correspondences between text and pictures, which is supposed to support text-picture integration and thus learning from multimedia. Previous research suggests that learners'…

The aim of the present study (n = 113) was to examine how (objective and subjective) information on peers' preparation, confidence, and past performance can support students in answering correctly in audience response systems (aka clickers). The result analysis shows that in the "challenging" questions, in which answers diverged,…

Research suggests that the three-option format is optimal for multiple choice questions (MCQs). This conclusion is supported by numerous studies showing that most distractors (i.e., incorrect answers) are selected by so few examinees that they are essentially nonfunctional. However, nearly all studies have defined a distractor as nonfunctional if…

Despite the wide use of peer assessment, questions about the helpfulness of peer feedback are frequently raised. In particular, it is unknown whether, how and to what extent peer feedback can help solve problems in initial texts in complex writing tasks. We investigated this research gap by focusing on the case of writing literature reviews in an…

Executing actions in a specific order is a critical component of many action sequences that children must acquire, the majority of which are learned through observation and imitation of others. Although a wealth of evidence indicates that children can process and represent temporal order in memory, relatively little is known about the development…

Massive open online courses are one of the most prominent trends in higher education in recent years. Instructional videos play a significant role in the massive open online courses platform. This study tested the impact of sending danmaku related to video content versus sending danmaku not related to video content versus not sending danmaku in…

This study explored advanced musicians' dispositions to flow in musical practice. A total of 168 classically trained musicians answered a questionnaire assessing their proneness for flow experience during musical practice and associations between flow and demographic factors, practice routines and musical instruments. Dispositions to flow in…

We examine the relevance of task exposure specificity in the development of self-efficacy evaluations among 15-year-old students in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. We use data from the 2012 edition of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to assess if students' self-efficacy evaluations…

In the current study we examined students' course performance, perceptions, and self-reported use of an open textbook compared to a traditional publisher's textbook in an introductory psychology course. Sixty students from two course sections used either an open textbook or a traditional textbook. To minimize the effect of confounding variables,…

This study was designed to determine the factor(s) that influence the choice of the foot throughout the lifespan. To achieve this purpose, 86 right-footed participants (young children (5-- 8), adolescents (10-14), young adults (18-25) and older adults (over 50) were tested on two tasks of different levels of difficulty, performed in three spatial…

Cross-situational word learning (XSWL) tasks present multiple words and candidate referents within a learning trial such that word-referent pairings can be inferred only across trials. Adults encode fine phonological detail when two words and candidate referents are presented in each learning trial (2 × 2 scenario; Escudero, Mulak, & Vlach,…

The segmenting effect states that people learn better when multimedia instructions are presented in (meaningful and coherent) learner-paced segments, rather than as continuous units. This meta-analysis contains 56 investigations including 88 pairwise comparisons and reveals a significant segmenting effect with small to medium effects for retention…