In recent years the study of second language (L2) vocabulary learning through reading has attracted much attention in the field of L2 acquisition. A specific area that has received wide interest is the examination of the processes involved in deriving word meanings from context. The purpose of the present study was to examine the relationships…

This article reports the results of a quantitative matching study investigating the impact on first-year students of a two-semester learning community. Results indicate a statistically significant association between LEAP participation and academic performance measured by retention, GPA, and time to graduation. Participation was associated with…

The current review addresses the validity of published meta-analyses in education that determines the credibility and generalizability of study findings using a total of 56 meta-analyses published in education in the 2000s. Our objectives were to evaluate the current meta-analytic practices in education, identify methodological strengths and…

This study examines strategies (inferencing and ignoring) and knowledge sources (semantics, morphology, paralinguistics, etc.) that second language learners of English use to process unfamiliar words in listening comprehension and whether the use of strategies or knowledge sources relates to successful text comprehension or word comprehension.…

Research Findings: Multitiered instructional frameworks are becoming a recommended approach for enhancing prevention and intervention efforts targeting early literacy and language skills. However, few studies to date have studied the feasibility of tiered oral language interventions before kindergarten; therefore, this pilot study explored the…

Students who are preparing to become registered nurses are more likely to attend community colleges due to the unequal distribution of financial resources to educational systems that have evolved from the impact of globalization. The purpose of this descriptive cross-sectional study was to increase the understanding of mentoring as it relates to…

"Class Size: What Research Says and What It Means for State Policy" argues that increasing average class size by one student will save about 2% of total education spending with negligible impact on academic achievement. It justifies this conclusion on the basis that Class-Size Reduction (CSR) is not particularly effective and is not as…

The "Project WILD K-12 Curriculum and Activity Guide" focuses on wildlife and habitat. It is organized in topic units and is based on the Project WILD conceptual framework. Because these activities are designed for integration into existing courses of study, instructors may use one or many Project WILD activities or the entire set of activities…

Social studies students can learn to glean historical information from the study of material culture through active engagement as curators. Teachers can guide students through a pre-survey of helpful reading materials and then through selecting items of personal significance to them: creating labels that objectively describe the chosen items as to…

The focus article by Coburn and Turner (this issue) seeks to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding data use in the context of data-use interventions. This commentary focuses on what the authors see as a glaring omission in what is otherwise a valuable framework: the issue of "useful data." It is their contention that the usefulness…

The goal of this case study was to describe characteristic features of abductive inquiry learning activities in the domain of earth science. Participants were undergraduate junior and senior students who were enrolled in an earth science education course offered for preservice secondary science teachers at a university in Korea. The undergraduate…

This study used simulation (a) to compare the kernel equating method to traditional equipercentile equating methods under the equivalent-groups (EG) design and the nonequivalent-groups with anchor test (NEAT) design and (b) to apply the parametric bootstrap method for estimating standard errors of equating. A two-parameter logistic item response…

Recently, Thibault and colleagues described the Duchenne marker as a cultural dialect for the perception of smile authenticity. The current study had the goal to follow up on this finding and to investigate the cues that French Canadian children use to evaluate the authenticity of smiles from members of three ethnic groups. The authenticity of six…

Humans are adept at inferring the mental states underlying other agents' actions, such as goals, beliefs, desires, emotions and other thoughts. We propose a computational framework based on Bayesian inverse planning for modeling human action understanding. The framework represents an intuitive theory of intentional agents' behavior based on the…

Conditional reasoning studies typically involve presenting a major conditional premise ("If P then Q"), a minor premise (P) and a conclusion (Q). We describe how most fMRI studies investigate reasoning and point out that these studies neglect to take into consideration the temporal sequence of cognitive steps generated by the interaction of the…