Background: Aphasia is an acquired language disorder that occurs secondary to brain injury, such as stroke. It causes communication difficulties that have a significant impact on quality of life and social relationships. Although the efficacy of speech-language therapy has been clearly demonstrated in this population, long-term services are…

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have become an inseparable part of people's lives. For children the use of ICT is as natural as breathing and therefore they find the use of ICT in school education as normal as the use of textbooks. The purpose of this review study is to explore the efficacy of computer games on language learning…

When a child does not seem to be ready for primary school, a popular practice is to grant the child more time by letting it repeat kindergarten. However, previous quasi-experimental research demonstrated negative, though diminishing, effects of kindergarten retention on academic learning during the first years of primary school. The present study…

Objective: To assess the effectiveness of psychoanalytic/psychodynamic psychotherapy for children and adolescents who have been sexually abused. Method: The Cochrane Collaboration's criteria for data synthesis and study quality assessment were used. Electronic bibliographic databases and web searches were used to identify randomized and…

Although still a matter of some debate, there is a growing body of research supporting Early and Intensive Behavioral Intervention as the intervention of choice for children with autism. Learning rate is an alternative to change in standard scores as an outcome measure in studies of early intervention. Learning rates can be displayed graphically…

Background: The rising prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) increases the need for evidence-based behavioral treatments to lessen the impact of symptoms on children's functioning. At present, there are no curative or psychopharmacological therapies to effectively treat all symptoms of the disorder. Early intensive behavioral intervention…

Inside the globalisation era in which society is immersed, one of the current challenges for any educational system is to provide quality education. While some countries are linguistically homogeneous, many countries and regions display a wealth of linguistic diversity and it is essential to adapt the educational system to those realities. In…

Although previous research has demonstrated learning benefits for both instructors and students in the web-based collaborative learning environments, one of them major difficulties is the lack of a practical approach to assist teachers in evaluating the knowledge contribution of learners. A novel method of merging multi-modes of assessment and…

The goal of this study is to develop a virtual farm for educational applications. Users can play the role of a farmer by planting vegetables and raising poultry on the virtual farm to observe their growth through online learning activities. The virtual farm possesses educational and entertaining functions, and it is designed by simulating the real…

In January 2009, in the last week of the Bush Administration, the U.S. Department of Education (ED), upon orders from the departing political appointee staff, published the final report in a long running National Evaluation of Upward Bound (UB). The study was conducted by the contractor, Mathematica Policy Research. After more than a year in…

In this paper, a new dance training system based on the motion capture and virtual reality (VR) technologies is proposed. Our system is inspired by the traditional way to learn new movements-imitating the teacher's movements and listening to the teacher's feedback. A prototype of our proposed system is implemented, in which a student can imitate…

Criteria for suitable research designs for use with large databases are suggested and analyzed. The advantages and disadvantages of several types of quasi-experimental designs are compared. Examples are taken from the authors' research with data from the Manitoba Health Services Commission. (Author/AL)

Suggestions, based on the experience of researchers at Oak Ridge (Tennessee) Associated Universities (ORAU), are offered on how evaluations in which true experimental designs are not possible can be designed for meaningful comparison. The ORAU conducts evaluation and assessment studies of educational programs intended to explore some aspect of the…

Researchers in the field of bioinformatics have developed a number of analytical programs and databases that are increasingly important for advancing biological research. Because bioinformatics programs are used to analyze, visualize, and/or compare biological data, it is likely that the use of these programs will have a positive impact on biology…