The purpose of this study was to examine the associations between reading motivation and inference generation while reading. Undergraduate participants (N = 69) read two science articles while thinking aloud, completed a standardized reading comprehension assessment, and self reported their habitual reading motivation. Findings indicate that…

An evaluation system that is designed to support and improve teacher practice--rather than simply to assess and manage teacher performance--would have as its foundation effective and reliable processes to observe classroom practice and give teachers useful feedback. Such an improvement-focused evaluation system should be aligned with and…

Much of human communication and collaboration is predicated on making predictions about others' actions. Humans frequently use predictions about others' action mistakes to correct others and spare them mistakes. Such anticipatory correcting reveals a social motivation for unsolicited helping. Cognitively, it requires forward inferences about…

This research is a multi-aspect exploratory investigation of Russian English institutional written discourse and highlights its features demonstrated by Russian native learners, tertiary students of English for the tourism and hospitality industry. The author approaches the theme from the perspectives of World Englishes and the pedagogical agenda.…

Purpose: Factor analysis is a useful technique to aid in organizing multivariate data characterizing speech, language, and auditory abilities. However, knowledge of the limitations of factor analysis is essential for proper interpretation of results. The present study used simulated test scores to illustrate some characteristics of factor…

For many years, students have been taught to visualise data by drawing graphs. Recently, there has been a growing trend to teach statistics, particularly statistical concepts, using interactive and dynamic visualisation tools. Free down-loadable teaching and simulation software designed specifically for schools, and more general data visualisation…

Although instructional explanations are commonly used to introduce learners to new learning content, previous studies have often shown that their effects on learning outcomes are minimal. This failure might partly be due to mental passivity of the learners while processing introductory explanations and to a lack of opportunity to revise potential…

People consider alternative causes when deciding whether a cause is responsible for an effect (diagnostic inference) but appear to neglect them when deciding whether an effect will occur (predictive inference). Five experiments were conducted to test a 2-part explanation of this phenomenon: namely, (a) that people interpret standard predictive…

The purpose of this study is to investigate how English implicit referential meaning is translated into Arabic by analyzing sentences containing implicit referential meanings found in the novel "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban". The analysis shows that the translation of English implicit referential meaning into Arabic can be…

This article engages with recent policy on reading comprehension. It argues that the construct of inference has been treated as a single entity despite research and literature to the contrary, and this is perpetuated in the National Curriculum for 2014. It explores the limitations of conceptualising inference as a unitary construct and…

An utterance such as "Show me the large rabbit" potentially generates a "contrastive inference," i.e., the article "the" and the adjective "large" allow listeners to pragmatically infer the existence of other entities having the same noun (e.g. a "small" rabbit). The primary way to measure…

Our aim in the present paper is to discuss a "cognitive view" of reading comprehension, with particular attention to research findings that have the potential to improve our understanding of difficulties in reading comprehension. We provide an overview of how specific sources of difficulties in inference making, executive functions, and…

When item parameter estimates are used to estimate the ability parameter in item response models, the standard error (SE) of the ability estimate must be corrected to reflect the error carried over from item calibration. For maximum likelihood (ML) ability estimates, a corrected asymptotic SE is available, but it requires a long test and the…

Increasing the correlation between the independent variable and the mediator ("a" coefficient) increases the effect size ("ab") for mediation analysis; however, increasing a by definition increases collinearity in mediation models. As a result, the standard error of product tests increase. The variance inflation caused by…

Due to an increasing interest in the use of single-subject experimental designs (SSEDs), appropriate techniques are needed to analyze this type of data. The purpose of this paper proposal is to present four studies (Beretvas, Hembry, Van den Noortgate, & Ferron, 2013; Bunuan, Hembry & Beretvas, 2013; Moeyaert, Ugille, Ferron, Beretvas,…