Free online courses, including Massively Open Online Courses, have great potential to increase the inclusiveness of education, but suffer from very high course dropout rates. A study of 172 K-12 students and 114 K-12 teachers taking the same free, online, summertime programming course finds that student and teacher populations have different…

Educational Badges are touted as an alternative assessment that can increase learner motivation. We considered two distinct models for educational badges; merit badges and videogame achievements. To begin unpacking the relationship between badges and motivation, we conducted a study using badges within an intelligent-tutor system for teaching…

Two experiments using the science topics of Magnetism and Light were conducted with younger learners (Year 5) who had no prior knowledge of the topics, and older learners (Year 6) who had studied the topics previously. Half of the learners were presented the information in auditory form only while the other half were presented the auditory…

New literacies researchers have identified a core set of strategies for locating information, one of which is "reading a Web page to locate information that might be present there" (Leu et al. in: Rush, Eakle, Berger (eds) "Secondary school reading and writing: What research reveals for classroom practices," 2007, p. 46). Do middle-school, high…

This study examined the effects of prior knowledge, learner preference for control, and type of control (learner or program) on the achievement of middle-school students in a computer-based instructional program on adding and subtracting integers. Students were blocked by preference-for-control scores and randomly assigned to either a…