The "Accelerated Reader" program is a guided reading intervention in which teachers are closely involved with student reading of text. It involves two components, the "Accelerated Reader" software and "Accelerated Reader Best Classroom Practices" (formerly called "Reading Renaissance"). The "Accelerated…

Purpose: This paper aims to sketch the emerging notion of auto-adaptive software when applied to e-learning software. Design/methodology/approach: The study and the implementation of the auto-adaptive architecture are based on the operational framework "ActiveTutor" that is used for teaching the topic of computer science programming in first-grade…

The Mechanical Equivalent of Heat Apparatus from PASCO scientific provides the means for doing a simple experiment to determine the mechanical equivalent of heat, "J." A necessary step of this experiment is to determine the temperature of an aluminum cylinder. By measuring the resistance of a thermistor embedded in the cylinder, one is able to…

Most homes in developed countries have a sophisticated data acquisition board, namely the PC sound board. Designed to be able to reproduce CD-quality stereo sound, it must have a sampling rate of at least 44 kHz and have very accurate timing between the two stereo channels. With a very simple adaptation of a pair of regular PC microphones, a…

The role of technology in education is ever increasing. This article looks at students with disabilities and the problem of writing independently. Speech recognition technology offers an option, or solution, for students who have physical and/or learning disabilities and for students who cannot access and use computer keyboards or switches.…

Standard least squares analysis of variance methods suffer from poor power under arbitrarily small departures from normality and fail to control the probability of a Type I error when standard assumptions are violated. This article describes a framework for robust estimation and testing that uses trimmed means with an approximate degrees of…

This article describes a study that investigates learner responses to three distinct types of corrective feedback for misspellings produced by English learners of German. Twenty-eight beginner and intermediate students used an online parser-based system for German that recorded student interaction with the software over 15 weeks. The study…

The efficiency of teaching algorithms can be highly improved by utilizing the senses as educational aids. The authors have developed a new didactical method and a software tool which exemplifies, for the case of simple algorithms, how the involvement of eyesight, hearing and the kinaesthesia can help in the teaching and learning process. This…

In this paper we present eTeacher, an intelligent agent that provides personalized assistance to e-learning students. eTeacher observes a student's behavior while he/she is taking online courses and automatically builds the student's profile. This profile comprises the student's learning style and information about the student's performance, such…

eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is a new technology that is currently being extolled by many industry experts and software vendors. Potentially it represents a platform independent language for sharing information over networks in a way that is much more seamless than with previous technologies. It is extensible in that XML serves as a "meta"…

An Excel add-in--XSEOS--that implements several excess Gibbs free energy models and equations of state has been developed for educational use. Several traditional and modern thermodynamic models are available in the package with a user-friendly interface. XSEOS has open code, is freely available, and should be useful for instructors and students…

The [Co(4-pyrimidinolate)[subscript 2](H[subscript 2]O)[subscript n]] species, which can be easily and selectively prepared by simple addition of aqueous solutions of the 4-pyrimidinolate organic ligand to Co(II) acetate (or nitrate) aqueous solutions (n = 4, 6) or by controlled heating of the hydrated phases (n = 0), proved to be versatile…

This article presents a list of this year's best practices from America's classrooms. This list was compiled by the staff of the Tech&Learning magazine. These best practices include: (1) video programs produced by the Horry County in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; (2) a gaming design course introduced at Phoebus High School, Hampton City Schools,…

We appropriate Rogoff's ("Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context," 1991; in: Wertsch et al. (eds.) "Sociocultural studies of mind," 1993) notion of guided participation to demonstrate, through abbreviated case studies, our strategy for integrating mobile technology-based learning experiences in higher education. Guided…

While most high school juniors in Howard County, Maryland, were quietly studying in their classrooms, students enrolled in the Energy, Power and Transportation Academy (EPT) of the Applications and Research Lab (ARL), in Ellicott City, were making a lot of noise, welding and cutting away to build an all-terrain wheelchair. The author was a part of…