Curriculum-based measurement of reading (CBM-R) is used in research and practice to estimate the level and trend of student achievement. Although there is limited empirical or psychometric support to guide CBM-R progress monitoring practices, derived trend estimates are used to inform a variety of educational decisions including evaluations of…

Many benefits have been claimed for visualizations, a general assumption being that learning is facilitated. However, several researchers argue that little is known about the cognitive value of graphical representations, be they schematic visualizations, such as diagrams or more realistic, such as virtual reality. The study reported in the paper…

This paper describes designing and implementing a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) study in a basic electrical circuits course at LaGuardia Community College. Inspired by my understanding of Shulman's (2005) concept of "signature pedagogy" and Mazur's (2009) emphasis on student-centered approaches, and aware that our students…

We propose an in silico experiment to introduce the classical density functional theory (cDFT). Density functional theories, whether quantum or classical, rely on abstract concepts that are nonintuitive; however, they are at the heart of powerful tools and active fields of research in both physics and chemistry. They led to the 1998 Nobel Prize in…

This laboratory exercise introduces undergraduate chemistry majors to the spectroscopic and theoretical study of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH), corannulene. Students explore the spectroscopic properties of corannulene using UV-vis and Raman vibrational spectroscopies. They compare their experimental results to simulated vibrational…

This paper presents a piece of educational software covering a comprehensive number of topics of chemical kinetics, which is available free of charge in Portuguese and English. The software was developed to support chemistry educators and students in the teaching-learning process of chemical kinetics by using animations, calculations, and…

Scientific issues like the behavior of wild and domesticated animals can serve as a motivation to learn programming concepts. Instead of following a systematic introduction, the students directly dive into programming and start immediately with their projects. In this constructionist approach the educational challenge for the teacher is to provide…

Introductions of computer-aided software and simulators are implemented during the sophomore-year of the chemical engineering (ChE) curriculum at the American University of Sharjah (AUS). Our faculty concurs that software integration within the curriculum is beneficial to our students, as evidenced by the positive feedback received from industry…

Pervasive gaming is a new and emerging gaming genre where the physical and social aspects of the real world are integrated into the game and blends into the player's everyday life. Given the nature of pervasive games, it may be possible to use that type of game as a tool to support learning in a university course by providing a gameplay where the…

According to the retrieved context theory of episodic memory, the cue for recall of an item is a weighted sum of recently activated cognitive states, including previously recalled and studied items as well as their associations. We show that this theory predicts there should be compound cuing in free recall. Specifically, the temporal contiguity…

According to theories of embodied cognition, a critical element in language comprehension is the formation of sensorimotor simulations of the actions and events described in a text. Although much of the embodied cognition research has focused on simulations of motor actions, we ask whether readers form simulations of story characters' linguistic…

A promising instructional approach corresponds to" learning by observing others learn" (i.e., by watching tutorial dialogue between a tutor and tutee). However, more work is needed to understand this approach's pedagogical utility. Thus, in 2 experiments we compared student learning from collaborative observation of dialogue with 2 other…

This paper reports on a study of the purposes for literacy discernible in young children's use of the virtual world, "Club Penguin." Twenty-six children aged between 5 and 11 took part in semi-structured interviews in which their use of virtual worlds was explored. Further, three 11-year-old children were filmed using "Club…

The integration of learning games into schools holds significant promise, yet faces numerous obstacles. Ubiquitous games (casual games for smart phones) attempt to motivate students to engage repeatedly with content beyond school, while enabling teachers to facilitate deeper reflection on game-related curricula during class. During a two-year…

Research has demonstrated that simulation-based inquiry learning has significant advantages for learning outcomes when properly scaffolded. For successful learning in science with simulation-based inquiry, one needs to ascertain levels of background knowledge so as to support learners in making, evaluating and modifying hypotheses, conducting…