India and China are two fast growing economies of the world and need large skill based manpower to sustain the economic growth. The existing formal higher educational system in these countries will not be able to meet the demand of the economy. The paper will try (i) to compare the development of economy and distance education in India and China…

Reading comprehension is a key issue in learning English as a foreign language, and it is critical that teachers utilize pre-reading strategies in reading classes in order to help students enhance their comprehension. The present study investigates the effectiveness of two pre-reading strategies on EFL students' performance in reading…

Our study contributes to our understanding of Internet reading by Emergent Bilinguals (EB) and Native English speakers (NS) by investigating their recall of two Internet reading passages containing additional information available through either hypertext links or footnotes. Participants included 25 EB and 25 NS college students. Answers to cued…

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…

This study aims at describing and analysing systematically an interactive learning environment designed to teach Quantum Physics, a second-year physics course. The instructional design of Quantum Physics is a combination of interactive lectures (using audience response systems), tutorials and self-study in unit blocks, carried out with small…

Although any mainstream thought is subject to theoretical challenges, the challenges to the mainstream cognitive perspective on transfer have had an unfortunate divisive effect. This article takes a pragmatic view that transfer perspectives are simply designed objects (Plomp & Nieveen, 2007), which provide different information for different…

One critical tool for creating an environmentally literate citizenry is to reach students other than those in environmental-related majors in the form of the university-level large introductory environmental studies course. In this study, we relate student academic background to initial and final environmental awareness results. We found that…

Research conducted over the past decade has consistently reported no significant differences in learning outcomes for students of fully online or face-to-face (F2F) instruction. Only a small number of these studies, however, have focused on courses in second language (L2) teacher preparation programs. Even fewer studies have compared the impact of…

We examined the effect of curriculum organization in US high schools where students could freely choose to study mathematics from textbooks that employed one of two types of content organization, an "integrated" approach or a (traditional) "subject-specific" approach. The study involved 2,242 high school students, enrolled in…

Elaborative interrogation, which prompts students to answer why-questions placed strategically within informational text, has been shown to increase learning comprehension through reading. In this study, elaborative interrogation why-questions requested readers to explain why paraphrased statements taken from a reading were "true."…

It is widely documented that the density property of rational numbers is challenging for students. The framework theory approach to conceptual change places this observation in the more general frame of problems faced by learners in the transition from natural to rational numbers. As students enrich, but do not restructure, their natural number…

Is there an achievement gap for online reading ability based on income inequality that is separate from the achievement gap in traditional, offline reading? This possibility was examined between students in two pseudonymous school districts: West Town (economically advantaged) and East Town (economically challenged; N = 256). Performance-based…

Articulation agreements between colleges and universities, whereby students with two-year college diplomas can receive advancement toward a four-year university degree, are provincially mandated in some Canadian provinces and highly encouraged in others. In this study, we compared learning in college transfer and direct-entry from high school…

The study compared the effects of a refutation text on comprehension and learning outcomes to those of a standard expository text. Undergraduate students with varying amounts of accurate and inaccurate prior knowledge read and recalled a refutation or an expository text about energy. Comprehension measures included the amount of text information…

The assessment of literacy and numeracy skills of students as they enter school for the first time is not yet established nation-wide in Australia. However, a large proportion of primary schools have chosen to assess their starting students on the Performance Indicators in Primary Schools-Baseline Assessment (PIPS-BLA). This series of three…