Predictive inference is the anticipation of the likely consequences of events described in a text. This study investigated predictive inference generation during second language (L2) reading, with a focus on the effects of strategy instructions. In this experiment, Japanese university students read several short narrative passages designed to…

Critical thinking (CT) is a metacognitive process, consisting of a number of sub-skills and dispositions, that, when used appropriately, increases the chances of producing a logical solution to a problem or a valid conclusion to an argument. CT has been identified as a fundamental learning objective of third-level education; however, students…

Students attending a Native Hawaiian-serving institution read statements from two hypothetical job candidates. The passages had equivalent meaning, but one incorporated Hawaiian leadership values (HLV) without identifying them as such. Participants judged the HLV candidate to have lower credibility, rationality, and effectiveness, and preferred…

Student conceptions related with matter and the particulate nature of matter (PNM), are vital for advanced understanding in chemistry, and have been a research area of significant attention. Lacking in the literature are studies addressing chemical misconceptions from an ontological point of view. The purpose of the current study was to develop a…

This article aims at exploring various strategies for coping with the auditory processing disorder in the light of foreign language acquisition. The techniques relevant to dealing with the auditory processing disorder can be attributed to environmental and compensatory approaches. The environmental one involves actions directed at creating a…

Rural students are at risk for vocabulary underdevelopment and often have less access to educational resources. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the effectiveness of an Internet-based Speech/Language Pathologist (SLP)-teacher consultation to support rural teachers' vocabulary instruction to improve their students' lexical…

This study aims to explore the factors in a patient's rehabilitation achievement after a total knee replacement (TKR) patient exercises, using a PCA-ANFIS emotion model-based game rehabilitation system, which combines virtual reality (VR) and motion capture technology. The researchers combine a principal component analysis (PCA) and an adaptive…

The processes by which individuals can construct proofs based on visual arguments are poorly understood. We investigated this issue by presenting eight mathematicians with a task that invited the construction of a diagram, and examined how they used this diagram to produce a formal proof. The main findings were that participants varied in the…

What do paleontologists, dinosaur tracks, and the nature of science have in common? They're combined here in an inquiry activity where students use methods of observation and inference to devise evidence-based explanations for the data they collect about dinosaur tracks, much like the methods used by paleontologists. Students then debate the…

In this thesis, we study the importance of background knowledge in relation extraction systems. We not only demonstrate the benefits of leveraging background knowledge to improve the systems' performance but also propose a principled framework that allows one to effectively incorporate knowledge into statistical machine learning models for…

Although previous research has established that multiple top-down factors guide the identification of words during speech processing, the ultimate range of information sources that listeners integrate from different levels of linguistic structure is still unknown. In a set of experiments, we investigate whether comprehenders can integrate…

Using survey data from novice teachers at the elementary and middle school level across 11 districts, multilevel logistic regressions were estimated to examine the association between novices' perceptions of the administrative climate and their desire to remain teaching within their schools. We find that the probability that a novice teacher…

An emerging literature indicates that dispositional bias in causal attribution of social behavior is weaker for people with working-class (vs. middle-class) backgrounds. However, it is unknown whether this difference is also present in spontaneous forms of trait inference. In the current work, American undergraduates were asked to merely memorize…

This article discusses the acquisition of gender in Russian, focusing on some exceptional subclasses of nouns that display a mismatch between semantics and morphology. Experimental results from twenty-five Russian-speaking monolinguals (age 2 ; 6-4 ; 0) are presented and, within a cue-based approach to language acquisition, we argue that children…

In the United Kingdom, the majority of national assessments involve human raters. The processes by which raters determine the scores to award are central to the assessment process and affect the extent to which valid inferences can be made from assessment outcomes. Thus, understanding rater cognition has become a growing area of research in the…