This quantitative survey study examines the willingness of online students to adopt an immersive virtual environment as a classroom tool and compares this with their feelings about more traditional learning modes including our ANGEL learning management system and the Elluminate live Web conferencing tool. I surveyed 1,108 graduate students in…

Organizing and implementing telecollaboration projects in foreign language curricula is not an easy endeavour (Belz & Thorne, 2006; Guth & Helm, 2010), as pedagogical, organizational and technical issues have to be addressed before cross-cultural interaction sessions can be carried out (O'Dowd & Ritter, 2006). These issues make many teaching…

Virtual spaces allow abstract representations of reality that not only encourage student self-directed learning but also reinforce core content of the learning objective through visual metaphors not reproducible in the physical world. One of the advantages of such a space is the ability to escape the restrictions of the physical classroom, yet…

Three experiments examined whether the design of virtual learning environments influences undergraduates' enrollment intentions and anticipated success in introductory computer science courses. Changing the design of a virtual classroom--from one that conveys current computer science stereotypes to one that does not--significantly increased…

Purpose: This paper aims to identify methods of guidance and supervision used in air traffic control training. It also aims to show how these methods facilitate trainee participation in core work activities. Design/methodology/approach: The paper applies the tools of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology to explore the ways in which trainers…

The current meta-analysis study summarizes the effects of the GlobalEd Project, a web-based educational intervention of international negotiations embedded within social studies curricula, on middle and high school students' interest in social studies and negotiation self efficacy. Meta-analytic evidence supports statistically significant…

Background: In recent years, due to deliberate educational policy in various places around the world, children with dyslexia study in regular classes with non-dyslexic classmates. They do not appear handicapped, because their disabilities do not stem from physical deformities, and therefore, it is not easy to identify them in a group where the…

In this paper we present Geodromo, a prototype of an educational multimedia system, part of the Portuguese "Ciencia Viva" (Live Science) educational program, which is aimed at young people and designed with innovative characteristics. The project is based on a robotic multimedia simulator and an online puzzle game aimed at the…

Playing entertainment computer, video, and portable games, namely, digital games, is receiving more and more attention in academic research. Games are studied in different situations with numerous methods, but little is known about if and how the playing situation affects the user experience (UX) in games. In addition, it is hard to understand and…

This study examined the literacy practices of children ages 5-11 as they engaged in out-of-school use of virtual worlds. The purpose of the study was to explore the nature, purpose, and role of literacy in children's use of a virtual world. In this article, I reflect on how children's use of literacy practices in the virtual world constructed and…

This article describes the research design of, and reports selected findings from, a scoping study aimed at examining current and planned applications of 3D immersive virtual worlds at higher education institutions across Australia and New Zealand. The scoping study is the first of its kind in the region, intended to parallel and complement a…

Rater behavior in essay grading can be viewed as a signal-detection task, in that raters attempt to discriminate between latent classes of essays, with the latent classes being defined by a scoring rubric. The present report examines basic aspects of an approach to constructed-response (CR) scoring via a latent-class signal-detection model. The…

Since W. Wundt (1904) and H. J. Watt (1906), researchers have found no agreement on how goals direct word retrieval. A prevailing associative account (E. K. Miller & J. D. Cohen, 2001) holds that goals bias association strength, which determines retrieval latency and whether irrelevant words interfere. A symbolic account (A. Roelofs, 2003) holds…

In psychological research, one often aims at explaining individual differences in S-R profiles, that is, individual differences in the responses (R) with which people react to specific stimuli (S). To this end, researchers often postulate an underlying sequential process, which boils down to the specification of a set of mediating variables (M)…

Objective: This study compared the effectiveness of two types of instructor feedback (relative to no feedback) on investigative interviewers' ability to adhere to open-ended questions in simulated practice interviews about child abuse. Method: In one condition, feedback was provided at the end of each practice interview. In the other, the…