Purpose: Investigate first- to third-graders' understandings of the police. Design/methodology/approach: Phenomenography is used to analyze elementary students' understandings of the police as a social institution Findings: The results indicate three qualitatively different ways of understanding the police. The police as: attributes, activities…

Young children's (n = 108) and adults' (n = 40) ability to compute ad-hoc quantity conversational implicatures was assessed using a new implicit task that relied on eye-tracking. The children were 2 and 5 years old. Looking times reveal that all participants interpreted simple references by relying on implicatures. However, 2-year-olds failed to…

Reading is an integral part of scholarly practice, though we do not often discuss how our approaches to reading differ, and how these approaches may ultimately make interpretive impact on our research. This essay considers approaches to reading in light of the concepts of proximity and orientation. Though formal "close reading" is a…

Mind maps are the most effective tools to improve learners' reading comprehension skills, as learners can detect the relationships and connections between ideas, figures, examples and embedded details through these maps. The present study aimed to identify the impact of using mind maps on improving the reading comprehension of eighth grade…

The benefits of high-quality family-school partnerships are numerous in terms of academic, behavioral, and social-emotional student outcomes. Therefore, discovering paths to improving the relationship is essential. Finding ways to strengthen the family-school partnership is particularly critical for families with students in special education.…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a rich vocabulary intervention on the comprehension and vocabulary learning of third-grade students with language learning disorders (LLD). The study used a repeated acquisition design (RAD), a single case design involving the repeated delivery of a vocabulary intervention on different sets…

The current study investigates the impact of an educational program based on cognitive neuroscience on developing reading comprehension skills among second-grade students in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. To achieve this objective, the researchers employed a quasi-experimental design, selecting a sample of 59 students from Princess Nora bint…

This paper evaluates the multistage adaptive test (MST) design of a large-scale academic language assessment (ACCESS) for Grades 1-12, with an aim to simplify the current MST design, using both operational and simulated test data. Study 1 explored the operational population data (1,456,287 test-takers) of the listening and reading tests of MST…

Indirect answers are a common type of non-literal language that do not provide an explicit "yes" or "no" to a question (e.g., "I have to work late" indirectly answered "Are you going to the party?" with a negative response). In the current study, we examined the developmental trajectory of comprehension of…

How do learners make sense of what they are learning? In this article, I present a new framework of sense-making based on research investigating the benefits and boundaries of generative learning activities (GLAs). The generative sense-making framework distinguishes among three primary sense-making modes--explaining, visualizing, and…

Recent work has investigated the origin of infant colour categories, showing pre-linguistic infants categorise colour even in the absence of colour words. These infant categories are similar but not identical to adult categories, giving rise to an important question about how infant colour perception changes with the learning of colour words. Here…

Vocabulary knowledge provides a critical foundation for later reading comprehension. Children with limited vocabularies and background knowledge often need many opportunities to learn a new word. One effective way to promote vocabulary acquisition for young children is to provide opportunities for children to learn new words throughout classroom…

Previous research suggests that exposure to accent variability can affect toddlers' familiar word recognition and word comprehension. The current preregistered study addressed the gap in knowledge on early language development in infants exposed to two dialects from birth and assessed the role of dialect similarity in infants' word recognition and…

Background: Benefited from advances in technology, virtual reality (VR) has been widely applied to learning content in operational training as well as hands-on courses. However, most current studies tend to evaluate learning effectiveness in this application, and few were focused on how learners can be benefited from transferring the knowledge…

This study examined the potential of eye-tracking as a tool for assessing reading comprehension. We administered three widely used reading comprehension tests with varying task demands to 79 typical adult readers while monitoring their eye movements. In the "York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension" (YARC), participants were given…