There is increasing evidence that games provide good learning environments, particularly in their ability to drive tenacity and intrinsic motivation, two key characteristics needed for student success. Advancing technology now enables games to also serve as assessments with real-time data that gives teachers the ability to have immediate…

In a provocative and influential paper, Jesse Rothstein (2010) finds that standard value added models (VAMs) suggest implausible future teacher effects on past student achievement, a finding that obviously cannot be viewed as causal. This is the basis of a falsification test (the Rothstein falsification test) that appears to indicate bias in VAM…

While computing technologies are widely available in secondary schools, these technologies have had only limited impact on changing classroom practices. Partly, this can be attributed to an underdeveloped understanding of the role of the teacher in engaging in classroom practices that can support student learning with technology. In this study, we…

"School Budget Hold'em" is a game designed to help school districts rethink their budgeting process. It evolved out of Education Resource Strategies' (ERS) experience working with large urban districts around the country. "School Budget Hold'em" offers a completely new approach--one that can turn the budgeting process into a long-term visioning…

This paper focuses on the development of videogame-like applications in a 3D virtual environment as a complement to the face-to-face teaching and learning. With the changing role of teaching and learning and the increasing use of "blended learning," instructors are increasingly expected to explore new ways to attend to the needs of their…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between decision-making self-efficacy and decision-making performance in sport. Undergraduate students (N = 78) performed 10 trials of a decision-making task in baseball. Self-efficacy was measured before performing each trial. Decision-making performance was assessed by decision speed and…

The 2008 commercial video game "Spore" allowed more than a million players to design their own life forms. Starting from single-celled organisms players played through a caricature of natural history. Press coverage of the game's release offer two frames for thinking about the implications of the game. Some scientists and educators saw the game as…

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods enable a fully Bayesian approach to parameter estimation of item response models. In this simulation study, the authors compared the recovery of graded response model parameters using marginal maximum likelihood (MML) and Gibbs sampling (MCMC) under various latent trait distributions, test lengths, and…

A mobile learning research project was conducted in Trinidad and Tobago to determine if mobile learning can assist high school students in learning mathematics. Several innovative techniques were used in this research to address the problem of high failure rates of mathematics in high schools in the Caribbean. A mobile learning application was…

Health care is constantly evolving. Health care professionals and the educators responsible for training those professionals need efficient ways to a) assure new information is getting across to the students and/or professionals, b) relay all new and previous information in a timely manner, and c) correctly utilize the information gathered and…

Students often find themselves disconnected from foundations courses such as Philosophy of Education, citing the abstract nature of some of the ideas studied and a perceived disconnect from practical issues. Moreover, the place/space of the university classroom itself can be seen to contribute to students' disengagement and stunting of their…

In contexts other than immersive virtual environments, theoretical and empirical work has identified flow experience as a major factor in learning and human-computer interaction. Flow is defined as a "holistic sensation that people feel when they act with total involvement". We applied the concept of flow to modeling the experience of…

Researchers on bilingual processing can benefit from computational tools developed in artificial intelligence. We show that a normalized Levenshtein distance function can efficiently and reliably simulate bilingual orthographic similarity ratings. Orthographic similarity distributions of cognates and non-cognates were identified across pairs of…

Several researchers have investigated the effects of computer simulations on students' learning. However, few have focused on how simulations with authentic contexts influences students' inquiry skills. Therefore, for the purposes of this study, we developed a computer simulation (FossilSim) embedded in an authentic inquiry lesson. FossilSim…

This essay contributes to the growing literature on the benefits of using in-class simulations. We find that the use of a simulation in an urban politics class improved student achievement and understanding of theoretical concepts across a range of measures regardless of student GPA or major status. Special care was taken to ensure the simulation…