This study examined and compared the effectiveness of a simultaneous prompting procedure used in both 1:1 and small group instruction to teach pretend play skills to a group of preschool students, three having a diagnosis of pervasive developmental disorder and one having a diagnosis of severe developmental disabilities. The study also assessed…

Drawing on the theory of documents representation (Perfetti et al., Toward a theory of documents representation. In: H. v. Oostendorp & S. R. Goldman (Eds.), "The construction of mental representations during reading." Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999), we argue that successfully dealing with multiple documents on the World Wide Web requires readers to…

Although writing learning protocols is an effective follow-up course work activity, many learners tend to do it in a rather suboptimal way. Hence, we analyzed the effects of instructional support in the form of prompts. The effects of different types of prompts were investigated in an experiment with four conditions: cognitive prompts,…

This article introduces an activity based on Standard 12 of the "Standards for Technological Literacy" that will help students develop good writing skills. It also describes the elements of a writing prompt and of a rubric, the advantages of using rubrics, and the writing development process itself. It provides an activity through which students…

Using a continuous tracking task, the authors examined whether stopping is resistant to expectancies as well as whether it is a representative measure of response control. Participants controlled the speed of a moving marker by continuously adjusting their response force. Participants stopped their ongoing tracking in response to auditory signals…

One hundred 18-month-olds were tested using sequential touching and following 4 different priming contexts using sets of toys that could be simultaneously categorized at either the basic or global level. An exact expression of the expected mean sequence length for arbitrary categories was derived as a function of the number of touches made, and a…

The Reading, Engaging, and Learning project (REAL) investigated whether a classroom intervention that enhanced young children's experience with informational books would increase reading achievement and engagement. Participants attended schools serving low income neighborhoods with 86% African American enrollment. The longitudinal study spanned…

Evidence-based practices (EBPs) are the basis on which teachers and other service providers are required to design educational programs for learners with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). As part of their work with the National Professional Development Center (NPDC) on ASD, researchers developed a process for reviewing the research literature and…

We investigated whether and how prior knowledge activation improves learning outcomes for high school (less experienced learners) and university students (experienced learners) in a hypertext environment. Map coherence was defined as the extent to which relationships between the concepts in the map were made explicit. Therefore, we classified the…

In two experiments, the ability of children younger than 20 months to engage in delayed ordered recall was investigated. In the first experiment, 13- and 16-month-old children were presented with 2-step event sequences and tested for recall, first, immediately following the event and second, after a one-week delay. Sequences were novel-causal,…

This discussion of the implications of schema theory and signaling theory for the design of both paper- and computer-based text describes the macro and micro levels of text structure and their interaction, provides a definition of signaling, and identifies four types of signals: (1) pointer words informing the reader of the author's perspective on…

A study examined the reaction of college freshmen to 30 essay test prompts to determine if rhetorical factors in the prompt would affect a student's choice of that prompt. The subjects, 40 college freshman enrolled in an introductory English course, rated eight rhetorical qualities of the essay prompts: (1) whether the essay would be easy to…

BECAUSE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF COLOR IN PICTORIAL INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS WAS INDETERMINATE, 5 EXPERIMENTS WERE DESIGNED TO INVESTIGATE EFFECTS OF COLOR CUE RELEVANCE (DEFINED AS A CORRELATION OVER TRIALS BETWEEN PRESENTATION OF A GIVEN STIMULUS CUE AND REINFORCEMENT OF A PARTICULAR RESPONSE) ON PAIRED-ASSOCIATE LEARNING. OTHER INDEPENDENT VARIABLES…