Early comprehension is an important, but not well-understood, contribution to early literacy and language development. Specifically, research regarding the nature of skills representative of early comprehension, including how they contribute to later reading success, is needed to support best practices to adequately prepare students. This article…

Academic language is frequently assumed to be especially challenging for students from families of low socioeconomic status (SES) and even more so for language-minority students. Due to their often especially disadvantaged position regarding socioeconomic background and exposure to the language of instruction, language minority students are…

The aim of this study was to provide adaptive assistance to improve the listening comprehension of eleventh grade students. This study developed a video-based language learning system for handheld devices, using three levels of caption filtering adapted to student needs. Elementary level captioning excluded 220 English sight words (see Section 1…

This investigation examined the influence of varying levels of Spanish receptive vocabulary and phonemic awareness ability on beginning English vocabulary, phonemic awareness, word reading fluency, and reading comprehension development across kindergarten through second grade. The 80 respondents were Spanish speaking children with no English…

We examined the criterion validity and diagnostic efficiency of oral reading fluency (ORF), word reading accuracy, and reading comprehension (RC) for students in Grades 7 and 8 taking into account form effects of ORF, time of assessment, and individual differences, including student designations of limited English proficiency and special education…

Studies in cognitive science have verified that working memory (where the brain solves problems) can manipulate nearly all elements of knowledge that can be recalled automatically from long-term memory, but only a few elements that have not previously been well memorized. Research in reading comprehension has found that "lecture notes with…

The simple view of reading proposes that reading comprehension is the product of word reading and language comprehension. In this study, we used the simple view framework to examine the early prediction of reading comprehension abilities. Using multiple measures for all constructs, we assessed word reading precursors (i.e., letter knowledge,…

Background: The phenotypic and genetic associations between decoding skills and ADHD dimensions have been documented but less is known about the association with reading comprehension. The aim of the study is to document the phenotypic and genetic associations between reading comprehension and ADHD dimensions of inattention and…

Animated pedagogical agents have become popular in multimedia learning with combined delivery of verbal and non-verbal forms of information. In order to reduce unnecessary cognitive load caused by such multiple forms of information and also to foster generative cognitive processing, multimedia design principles with social cues are suggested…

A theoretical framework which considers the verbal functions of the brain under a multivariate and comprehensive cognitive model was statistically analyzed. A confirmatory factor analysis was performed to verify whether some recognized aphasia constructs can be hierarchically integrated as latent factors from a homogenously verbal test. The Brief…

Given the significance of questioning as a high-level cognitive strategy in language teaching and learning in the literature on TEFL as well as in education in general, this study sought to make a systematic review of research studies conducted in the span of the last three decades on the issue of questioning across different disciplines with a…

We report on several specific student difficulties regarding the second law of thermodynamics in the context of heat engines within upper-division undergraduate thermal physics courses. Data come from ungraded written surveys, graded homework assignments, and videotaped classroom observations of tutorial activities. Written data show that students…

We present results of our investigation into student understanding of the physical significance and utility of the Boltzmann factor in several simple models. We identify various justifications, both correct and incorrect, that students use when answering written questions that require application of the Boltzmann factor. Results from written data…

We examined how learning new second language (L2) words was affected by three "task type" conditions (reading only, reading with a dictionary, reading and word focused exercises), three "number of encounters" conditions and their combinations. Three groups of L2 learners (n = 185) were exposed to 30 target words (one group in…

This study aims to explore the application of reading strategies to the reading of English texts by Thai vocational college students. Data were collected via questionnaire surveys, think-aloud experiments and semi-structured interviews. The research results reveal different typologies of reading strategies adopted by lower and higher level English…