The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of the asynchronous voice-conferencing technology, "Voice Thread"®, on the anxiety and oral proficiency of high school students in their third year of studying Spanish as a foreign language. In this quasi-experimental study students' foreign language anxiety levels and oral proficiency…

The dissertation examines how synchronous text-based computer-mediated communication (SCMC) tasks may affect English as a Second Language (ESL) learners' development of second language (L2) and academic literacy. The study is motivated by two issues concerning the use of SCMC tasks in L2 writing classes. First, although some of the alleged…

Effective communication skills are a vital component of student academic achievement and success, yet students often struggle with them. This study utilized an organizational writing graphic organizer based on a critical thinking model to determine the impact of its use on the persuasive writing scores of 9th-grade students. A sample of…

Writing to learn is a pedagogical approach grounded in the belief that the reasoning required to write about a topic or concept will help students gain understanding. However, research indicates that the impact writing has on student learning depends on context. Using a mixed-method, quasi-experimental, repeated measures design, we examined how…

Online instruction has been demonstrated to increase the academic achievement for post-secondary students; however, little empirical investigation has been conducted on high school students learning from online multimedia instruction in the traditional classroom. This study investigated the knowledge acquisition, transfer, and favorability of…

Improved student achievement requires the distribution of leadership beyond one individual. Given their daily connection to students, leadership opportunities distributed to classroom teachers are key to school improvement. Complicating the development of classroom teacher leaders are attrition rates and low teacher efficacy among novice…

Form-focused instruction is usually based on traditional practical/pedagogical grammar descriptions of grammatical features. The comparison of such traditional accounts with cognitive grammar (CG) descriptions seems to favor CG as a basis of pedagogical rules. This is due to the insistence of CG on the meaningfulness of grammar and its detailed…

The paper presents results of a multi-year quasi-experimental study of student engagement during which a video game was introduced into an undergraduate dynamic systems and control course. The video game, "EduTorcs", provided challenges in which students devised control algorithms that drive virtual cars and ride virtual bikes through a…

Reading is critical to students' success in and out of school. One potential means for improving students' reading is writing. In this meta-analysis of true and quasi-experiments, Graham and Herbert present evidence that writing about material read improves students' comprehension of it; that teaching students how to write improves their reading…

Objective: This study evaluated the potential of youth partnerships to improve the school environment and child nutrition. Methods: A quasi-experimental trial was conducted with 2 intervention and 3 control schools. Intervention schools selected student leaders to participate in youth-led interventions in their schools. Students (n = 104) were…

Objective: To assess the impact of an online continuing education course on the knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy of nutrition professionals to use an ecological approach to prevent childhood obesity. Design: Quasi-experimental design using intervention and delayed intervention comparison groups with pre/post-course assessments. Setting: Online…

The vocational schools in Taiwan regard professional certifications as a badge of skills achievement. The teaching in this context usually focuses on how to help students enhance their professional skills and pass the certificate examinations, particularly for computing courses. However, due to national education policy, pure online courses are…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the combination of both analogy-based simulation and laboratory activities as a teaching tool was more effective than utilizing them separately in teaching the concepts of simple electricity. The quasi-experimental design that involved 66 seventh grade students from urban Turkish elementary…

This quasi-experimental study investigated the effects of an Internet-delivered universally designed depth of vocabulary intervention that targeted both English-speaking and Spanish-English-speaking students. Two hundred forty students, 49% of whom were Spanish-English bilinguals, participated in the 16-week intervention. Intervention students…

The Rapid Review program at the University of Southern Indiana (USI) was designed to decrease the number of semesters under-prepared students spend completing the developmental mathematics sequence without sacrificing their ability to be successful in subsequent math courses. A quasi-experimental design was used to compare first-time, full-time…