This study was conducted to examine the impact of integrated humor on direct measures of students' ability to retain and transfer information from educational lessons. In two experiments, participants were randomly exposed to either a lesson with humorous examples or standard examples and were subsequently asked to take tests on the material. Data…

One of the recommended approaches in instructional design methods is to optimize the value of working memory capacity and avoid cognitive overload. Educational neuroscience offers novel processes and methodologies to analyze cognitive load based on physiological measures. Observing psychophysiological changes when they occur in response to the…

The question of "how we learn" continues to direct scholarly debate, yet undergraduate teaching is typically designed to homogenise the learning environment. This is despite heterogeneous learning outcomes ensuing for students, owing to their different learning styles. Accordingly, we examine the relationship between teaching…

Students attending object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD) courses typically encounter difficulties transitioning from requirements analysis to logical design and then to physical design. Concept maps have been widely used in studies of user learning. The study reported here, based on the relationship of concept maps to learning theory and…

The flipped classroom (FC) model has emerged as an innovative solution to improve student-centered learning. However, studies measuring student performance of material in the FC relative to the lecture classroom (LC) have shown mixed results. An aim of this study was to determine if the disparity in results of prior research is due to level of…

Oral narrative retelling is a complex linguistic and cognitive task that has been shown to map onto reading fluency and comprehension. Therefore, it is important to understand oral retelling skill, especially among "emergent bilingual" children--those who are learning two languages simultaneously. In this article, exploratory…

In most primary science classes, students are taught science inquiry skills by way of learning by doing. Research shows that explicit instruction may be more effective. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of explicit instruction on the acquisition of inquiry skills. Participants included 705 Dutch fifth and sixth graders. Students…

This article presents a problem-based learning (PBL) model for teaching a college U.S. history survey course (U.S. history since 1890) designed to promote postformal thinking skills and identify and explain thinking systems inherent in adult complex problem-solving. We also present the results of a study in which the outcomes of the PBL model were…

Language researchers have identified a number of elements related to language performance. One of these factors is individual attributes of the language learners or their cognitive ability. In the fall semester 2015, 18 undergraduates of Greek for academic purposes language course of a public university in Cyprus participated in the study. This…

Students' conceptions of learning (CoL) play an important role in the learning process leading to the development of generic skills. This paper investigates whether CoL of accounting students can be developed by incorporating high-level cognitive skills progressively within the accounting curriculum. First, the study explored, using…

This experimental study investigates the effect on the examination performance of a cohort of first-year undergraduate learners undertaking a Unified Modelling Language (UML) course using an adaptive learning system against a control group of learners undertaking the same UML course through a traditional lecturing environment. The adaptive…

This study aims to examine the effectiveness of using the iPad in learning to acquire the mental and performance skills in teaching the social studies. Using experimental design method, the study compared two groups: (a) experimental, taught using the iPad, and (b) control group, taught using the traditional learning without iPad. A total of 48…

Research Findings: Evolution by natural selection is often relegated to the high school curriculum on the assumption that younger students cannot grasp its complexity. We sought to test that assumption by teaching children ages 4-12 (n = 96) a selection-based explanation for biological adaptation and comparing their success to that of adults…

In this study, dynamic testing principles were applied to examine progression of analogy problem solving, the roles that cognitive flexibility and metacognition play in children's progression as well as training benefits, and instructional needs of 7- to 8-year-old gifted and average-ability children. Utilizing a pretest training posttest control…

This research inspects the allocation of involvement load to the evaluation component of the involvement load hypothesis, examining how three typical approaches to evaluation (cloze-exercises, sentence-writing, and composition-writing) promote word learning. The results of this research were partially consistent with the predictions of the…