All primary school children in England are to be entitled to learn a foreign language by 2010, based on the belief that an early start is beneficial for language learning in the long run. However, the evidence of the benefits of an early start is inconclusive, and it is also unclear what type of curriculum and pedagogy would be most appropriate…

The Interventions and Practice Research Infrastructure Program (IPRISP) funding mechanism was introduced by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to bridge the gap between the worlds of services research and the usual care practice in the community. The goal was to build infrastructure that would provide a platform for research to…

This article draws on both a cross-sector literature review of mechanisms to promote evidence-based practice and a specific review of ways of improving research use in social care. At the heart of the article is a discussion of three models of evidence-based practice: the research-based practitioner model, the embedded research model, and the…

This paper explores the role of diagrams and text in middle school students' understanding and visualisation of human body systems. We develop a common framework based on structure and function to assess students' responses across diagram and verbal modes. Visualisation is defined in terms of understanding transformations on structure and relating…

Clinical judgment is foundational to psychological practice. Accurate judgment forms the basis for establishing reasonable goals and selecting appropriate treatments, which in turn are essential in achieving positive therapeutic outcomes. Therefore, Spengler and colleagues' meta-analytic finding--clinical judgment accuracy improves marginally with…

We report a new study testing our proposal that word learning may be best explained as an approximate form of Bayesian inference (Xu & Tenenbaum, in press). Children are capable of learning word meanings across a wide range of communicative contexts. In different contexts, learners may encounter different sampling processes generating the examples…

Berent, Steriade, Lennertz, and Vaknin (2007) [Berent, I., Steriade, D., Lennertz, T., & Vaknin, V. (2007). "What We Know about What We Have Never Heard: Evidence from Perceptual Illusions". Cognition, 104, 591-630] demonstrate that English speakers' perception of onsets that are unattested in their language mirrors their typological markedness.…

The current study explores the inferential abilities of visually impaired children in a task presented in two formats, manipulative and verbal. The results showed that in the group of visually impaired children, just as with children with normal sight, there was a wide range of inference types. It was found that the visually impaired children…

In this paper we investigate the experiences of elementary school children over a two-year period during which they engaged with a hybrid Adventure Learning program. In addition to delineating Adventure Learning experiences, we report on educational technology implementations in ecologically valid and complex environments, while drawing inferences…

We examined (a) whether motivational orientation can spread from teachers to students during 2 consecutive teaching-learning sessions and (b) mechanisms underlying this phenomenon in a special physical education session delivered to high school students. Participants who were taught a sport activity by an allegedly paid instructor reported lower…

America can no longer afford an education system that fails to use data effectively to guide decisionmaking. The education sector is facing ever-increasing demands to improve student outcomes, reduce burden, increase efficiency, and improve transparency. These demands cannot be met without the strategic and effective use of data. Due to the…

Students with learning disabilities (LD) often struggle with reading comprehension (Shaywitz, 2003), even after attaining basic decoding skills. Similar proportions of students with LD have also been found to differ from their typical peers in some aspect of social adjustment (Kavale & Forness, 1996). Yet there is very little known about the…

An increasingly common approach to comparative education research, particularly with respect to mathematics education, has been the exploitation of video technology, not least because the use of video cameras offers several advantages over traditional methods such as direct observation. It is important to acknowledge, however, that video…

Low levels of reading performance are associated with delinquency. However, few studies have investigated the relationship between early involvement in the justice system and reading problems. This study examined the relationship between youth at various early stages of involvement with criminal behaviors and reading abilities (specifically,…

Currently the press to make policy and practice decisions on the basis of evidence is being coupled with recognition that real change requires shifts in organizational culture. Consequently, there are now many efforts to "re-culture" organizations by making evidence central to decision making. In this article, the authors problematize the notion…