This simple exercise, performed in teams, gives students practice in listening to instructions, particularly when there are restrictions for the communication. The teams compete in a limited amount of time to build a Lego[TM] structure based on the instructions of one team member. Which team listens the best and is most successful?

The role of vocabulary knowledge in supporting students' comprehension and understanding of their content-area reading is critical. This article explores how content-area teachers can help students become aware of, understand, and apply generative knowledge about English words to grow and develop their vocabularies. Generative vocabulary…

A multimodal approach combining acoustics, intelligibility ratings, articulography and surface electromyography was used to examine the characteristics of dysarthria due to cerebral palsy (CP). CV syllables were studied by obtaining the slope of F2 transition during the diphthong, tongue-jaw kinematics during the release of the onset consonant,…

Context-based chemistry education aims at making connections between real life and the scientific content of chemistry courses. The purpose of this study was to evaluate context-based chemistry studies. In looking for the context-based chemistry studies, the authors entered the keywords "context-based", "contextual learning" and "chemistry…

We are currently on the verge of several breakthroughs in nanoscience and technology, and we need to prepare our citizenry to be scientifically literate about the microscopic world. Previous research shows that students' mental models of friction at the atomic level are significantly influenced by their macroscopic ideas. Most students see…

Topic interest and learning from texts have been found to be positively associated with each other. However, the reason for this positive association is not well understood. The purpose of this study is to examine a cognitive process, inference generation, that could explain the positive association between interest and learning from texts. In…

This study provides a snapshot of elementary school teachers' understanding of the mean and median. The research is presented in light of recent work regarding preservice teachers' understanding of the mean. Common misconceptions are identified which lead to potential implications for teacher preparation programs. One of the primary concerns…

Children use syntax to interpret sentences and learn verbs; this is syntactic bootstrapping. The structure-mapping account of early syntactic bootstrapping proposes that a partial representation of sentence structure, the "set of nouns" occurring with the verb, guides initial interpretation and provides an abstract format for new learning. This…

We report three experiments investigating how people process anomalous sentences, in particular those in which the anomaly is associated with the verb. We contrast two accounts for the processing of such anomalous sentences: a syntactic account, in which the representations constructed for anomalous sentences are similar in nature to the ones…

In this qualitative study, we explored how oral interviews can inform instructors about students' understanding of abstract algebra and their ability to construct a proof in this setting. Our findings indicate that some students had a good understanding of the ideas needed for a subgroup proof, but could not write a coherent proof. On the other…

With the advent of technology, the implication of authentic multimedia-based teaching materials are using widely in language classrooms. Technology can be in service of teaching different skills such as listening, reading, speaking and writing. Among these skills listening comprehension is a skill in which the learners have problems to master.…

Understanding sustainability is important, as people need to cope with issues associated with over-population and over-consumption. Education is seen as a key strategy to assist with the development of people's understandings of this complex concept, which could then lead to them being able to make more sustainable lifestyle decisions. In order to…

Phylogenetic trees are widely used visual representations in the biological sciences and the most important visual representations in evolutionary biology. Therefore, phylogenetic trees have also become an important component of biology education. We sought to characterize reasoning used by introductory biology students in interpreting taxa…

Coh-Metrix analyzes texts on multiple measures of language and discourse that are aligned with multilevel theoretical frameworks of comprehension. Dozens of measures funnel into five major factors that systematically vary as a function of types of texts (e.g., narrative vs. informational) and grade level: narrativity, syntactic simplicity, word…

A growing number of studies now suggest that sensitivity to the rhythmic patterning of speech (prosody) is implicated in successful reading acquisition. However, recent evidence suggests that prosody is not a unitary construct and that the different components of prosody (stress, intonation, and timing) operating at different linguistic levels…