The debate on the validity of teaching students how to identify their own preferred learning style is not going to go away anytime soon as evidenced by the number of articles still being written about the topic. One can find numerous research studies that say students have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to learning and retaining…

Learning styles have been widely accepted in pedagogical practice but suffer from a distinct lack of empirical support. While a diverse range of learning styles have been proposed, modality preference has received the most attention within educational research and practice. Supporters of this theory posit that each individual has a dominant sense…

The author has been asked to respond to Lodge, Hansen, and Cottrell's recent (2015) paper in this journal and they have done a very thorough and scholarly job of dissecting the weaknesses of modality preference theories. They clearly and carefully analyse the nature of the evidence for modality preference and conclude that there is little if any…

In this paper I take up the questions posed by the conference organisers with respect to what we have learned and where we are going in technology-based research in mathematics education research. I begin by troubling the metaphors of crossroads and intersections and argue--through a wide range of considerations in relation to past research, to…

This chapter is a call for consequential education research that has transformative potential: intellectually, educationally, and socially. It is about learning to see differently. It is an argument about seeing our work with youth and communities in ways that can help education researchers see ingenuity instead of ineptness and inability, to see…

Research into learning technology has developed a reputation for being driven by rhetoric about the revolutionary nature of new developments, for paying scant attention to theories that might be used to frame and inform research, and for producing shallow analyses that do little to inform the practice of education. Although there is…

Currently, there are more theories of learning in use in mathematics education research than ever before (Lerman & Tsatsaroni, 2004). Although this is a positive sign for the field, it also has brought with it a set of challenges. In this article, I identify some of these challenges and consider how mathematics education researchers might think…

Exploring the friendships of disabled youth in forthcoming doctoral research raised many unsettling questions. Members of academic and disability communities thoughtfully asked how the researcher could legitimately understand, interpret and represent the experiences of disabled youth. The initial impulse was to rely on nearly two decades of…

Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis is being used increasingly to examine the memory processes underlying recognition memory. The authors discuss the methodological issues involved in conducting and analyzing ROC results, describe the various models that have been developed to account for these results, review the behavioral empirical…

Causes of inconclusive results concerning learning hierarchy research are examined. Two suggestions are given for overcoming problems and research flaws: maintain Gagne's original design, modifying shortcomings; and follow more rigorous methods presented by the author. (SM)

Examines the "cognitive process theory of writing" expounded by writing researchers Linda Flower and John R. Hayes, discussing problems with their theory and with the methodology on which it is based. (HTH)

Aims to clarify the distinction between elicitation and reinforcement discussed in Bloom (1984); to make explicit theoretical and methodological assumptions about the experimental analysis of infant behavior as shown in components of Poulson (1983); and to clarify differences in interpretation of other infant vocal conditioning research.…

Rewritten and shortened version of presentation given at a symposium of the American Psychological Association meeting, New York 1966. (MS)

Discusses the differences among researchers in learning style definitions, instruments used to identify learning style, and the applications of their research. (Author/MLF)

Concludes that attempts to maintain objectivity by measuring surface features of text end up describing effects rather than causes of coherence in text. (FL)