This study was conducted to determine the relative efficacy of text-structure strategy instruction compared to traditional instruction on the reading comprehension of 40 postsecondary students with learning disabilities (LD). Participants were randomly assigned to either a text-structure strategy condition or a traditional instruction condition.…

Noncompliance with instructions is among the most common behavior problems exhibited by preschoolers. Although three-step guidance compliance procedures have been shown to be effective to increase compliance among some children, they may require that a child be exposed to a number of trials before compliance begins to increase. In this study, a…

Purpose: To compare speech intelligibility in the presence of a 10-Hz square-wave noise masker in younger and older listeners and to relate performance to recovery from forward masking. Method: The signal-to-noise ratio required to achieve 50% sentence identification in the presence of a 10-Hz square-wave noise masker was obtained for each of the…

Efficient and effective lifelong learning requires that learners can make well informed choices from a vast amount of learning opportunities. This article proposes to support learners by drawing on principles of self-organization and indirect social navigation; by analysing choices made by learners who went before and feeding this information back…

The main purpose of this study is to investigate devotion to democratic values and conflict resolution abilities of elementary school students. In the direction of this general purpose, the level of the students' devotion to democratic values and conflict resolution abilities were investigated by the Devotion to Democratic Values Scale (DDVS) and…

The aim of the National Numeracy Strategy is to raise standards in numeracy. Strong evidence for its success has, however, been lacking: most of the available data come from performance on National Test assessments administered in schools or from Ofsted reports, and is vulnerable to suggestions of bias. An opportunistic analysis of data from a…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of achievement tests to measure long-term learning at the higher education level in traditional verses learner-centered classrooms. Volunteer instructors who use comprehensive achievement tests as an important component of their grading system were asked to complete an instrument that…

A lecture section of introductory biology that historically enrolled more than 500 students was split into two smaller sections of approximately 250 students each. A traditional lecture format was followed in the "traditional" section; lecture time in the "active" section was drastically reduced in favor of a variety of in-class student-centered…

In a previous study [Schwartz et al. (2005). "Written Language and Literacy," 8, 179-207] we showed that early literacy in Russian (L1) facilitated decoding acquisition in Hebrew (L2) among Russian-Hebrew first graders. The present study examined two alternative explanations for this finding. The first account concerns the general…

We examined how much agreement there was between scores from large-scale mandated assessments and report-card grades for 14,776 students in grades 3, 6, and 9 of a district in which conditions were conducive to alignment of assessments. We found significant mean differences between internal and external assessments: effect sizes were 0.29 to 0.63…

The authors investigate whether the choice of college textbook affects students' comprehension of the material. Forty-eight students from educational psychology courses were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: (1) unfamiliar passages drawn from the textbook used in the course, or (2) comparable passages selected from a competitor textbook.…

Using 3 waves of the TIMSS data, this study investigates the relationship between 8th-graders' mathematics and science achievement and their self-perceptions on these 2 subjects. For within-country data, there is generally a positive relationship between students' achievement and the following 3 measures of their self-perception: how much they…

Algebra knowledge is a critical part of middle-school mathematics achievement, and success in algebra is necessary for taking higher level mathematics courses and leads to higher scores on standardized tests. The purpose of this study was to simultaneously examine relationships between mathematics beliefs, classroom instructional strategies, and…

Reading is critical to children's academic and future economic success. Yet reading skills continue to lag in the upper elementary grades. One way that school districts across the country have responded to the challenge of improving students' reading skills has been to hire additional, presumably more skilled, teachers as "instructional…

The paper first describes a web-based essay critiquing system developed by the authors using latent semantic analysis (LSA), an automatic text analysis technique, to provide students with immediate feedback on content and organisation for revision whenever there is an internet connection. It reports on its effectiveness in enhancing adult EFL…