The main goal here is to introduce a new perspective through which cognitive learning theory plays an active role in instructional hypermedia design and evaluation through testing educational mediums that elicit two distinct levels of cognitive processing for materials of different levels of complexity. Results indicate that if the cognitive level…

Cognitive load can be defined as the amount of mental effort that performing a specific task imposes on a learner's cognitive system. It can be measured by the number of new concepts embedded in a learning task. English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners, with their limited English proficiency and minimal entry knowledge of a subject matter,…

The purpose of this study is to see if older adults who experience problems with thought suppression tend to encounter greater difficulty deriving a sense of meaning in life. Data from a longitudinal nationwide survey of older people (N = 988) indicate that greater difficulty with thought suppression is associated with a decline in meaning over…

This work presents a unique education resource for both process engineering students and the industry workforce. The learning environment is based around spherical imagery of real operating plants coupled with interactive embedded activities and content. This Virtual Reality (VR) learning tool has been developed by applying aspects of relevant…

A study was conducted that attempted to show changes in electroencephalographic (EEG) patterns (identified using topographic EEG mapping) when children were required to perform the relatively simple task of button pressing during an eyes-open baseline session of low cognitive demand and a complex reaction time (RT) task of high cognitive demand.…

Two studies were performed to investigate the effects of material and task variations in the acquisition of cognitive learning strategies. Groups of undergraduate students were taught to use mental imagery, meaningful elaboration, and grouping. The type of training task or the order of training and test materials differed for each of the…

The complexity of language of four, five, and six year old children was examined in a psycholinguistic study that attempted to differentiate the characteristics of sentences that were difficult for children to comprehend from those which were easy, and to discover whether children used a subject-verb-object (S-V-O) language strategy to interpret…

This paper suggests that a change in mode of expression --narrative, descriptive, or expository--can influence the syntactic complexity of children's writing. The implications of the research studies reviewed here may offer direction for education in general. Instructional strategies which make use of variation in writing mode to encourage gains…

To investigate developmental differences in timesharing performance, 60 boys, 20 in each of three age groups (7-, 10- and 13-year-olds), performed an auditory matching task and a tracking task alone and concurrently, the latter under two sets of instructions. Decrements produced by concurrent performance were compared for the three age groups.…

Confined to the interaction of complexity/simplicity of the stimulus play, this paper both focuses on the differing patterns of response between cognitively complex and cognitively simple persons to the characters in "The Homecoming" and "Private Lives" and attempts to determine the responses to specific characters or groups of…

The development and validation of the Test of Thematic Analysis (TTA) are described. The TTA measures the effects of liberal education as distinct from other kinds of education and general maturation. Scores were higher among seniors than freshmen at traditional liberal arts colleges. No significant differences were obtained at two vocationally…

Investigates children's difficulty in understanding (numerical) place value. A counting and estimating task, based on Piaget's number theory, was devised to determine if children in grades one through five evidenced this construction. (Author/BB)

An information-processing model was tested for a laboratory visualization task that represents one adaptation of a standardized spatial ability test. The pattern of results suggests that individual differences are a function of differences in the accuracy and/or quality of the mental representation, not just speed of processing. (Author/BW)

Today, mathematics education faces two major challenges: raising the floor by expanding achievement for all, and lifting the ceiling of achievement to better prepare future leaders in mathematics, as well as in science, engineering, and technology. Many students lack access to higher-level mathematics courses and teaching at all levels of…

The present findings imply that a readability formula is not an effective writing production criterion, even when the writer does not deliberately write to the formula. Comprehensibility of text might be better controlled through the proper use of the transformer concept (MacDonald-Ross and Waller). (Author/PN)