The aim of various approaches implemented, whether the classical "three Ps" (presentation, practice, and production) or communicative language teaching (CLT), is to achieve communicative competence. Although a lot of software developed for teaching spoken English is dressed up to raise interaction, its methodology is largely rooted in tradition.…

The number of experimentally derived structures of cellular components is rapidly expanding, and this phenomenon is accompanied by the development of a new semiotic system for teaching. The infographic approach is shifting from a schematic toward a more realistic representation of cellular components. By realistic we mean artist-prepared or…

Information technology (IT) has the potential to improve the clinical learning environment. The extent to which IT enhances or detracts from healthcare professionals' role performance can be expected to affect both student learning and patient outcomes. This study evaluated nursing students' satisfaction with a novel compartmental Picture…

Imaginary worlds have been devised by artists and commentators for centuries to focus satirical attention on society's problems. The increasing sophistication of three-dimensional graphics software is generating comparable "virtual worlds" for educational usage. Can such worlds play a satirical role suggesting developments in distance…

Using Excel, an interactive program is designed to simulate the Solow and endogenous growth models to facilitate the understanding of these models for students of growth theory and macroeconomics.

The objective of this study was to identify changes in dominant preferred learning styles of students based on instructional presentation of course content. This study evaluates dominant preferred learning styles of two groups of university students. The first group of students was enrolled in a course that introduces graphical representation in…

This paper investigates the uses of various kinds of hypermedia format for history learning, which specifically emphasizes on the role of causal reasoning about history accounts. Three different groups in the last school year of Secondary Education (aged 16) studied the same materials about the Discovery of America in three different formats: (a)…

Historical time and chronological sequence are usually conveyed to pupils via the presentation of semantic information on printed worksheets, events being rote-memorised according to date. We explored the use of virtual environments in which successive historical events were depicted as "places" in time-space, encountered sequentially in…

With the development of e-learning technology, many specifications of instructional design have been proposed to make learning activity sharable and reusable. With the specifications and sufficient learning resources, the researches further focus on how to provide learners more appropriate learning activities to improve their learning performance.…

Laypeople tend to be overly sensitive to side effects of treatments that prevent illness, possibly leading them to refuse beneficial therapies. This Internet-based study attempted to reduce such side effect aversion by adding graphic displays to the numerical risk probabilities. It also explored whether graphics reduce side effect aversion by…

As display technologies prepare to welcome 3-D, the 21st-century classroom will soon bear little resemblance to anything students and teachers have ever seen. In this article, the author presents the latest innovations in the world of digital display technology. These include: (1) Touchlight, an interactive touch screen program that takes a normal…

The graduate of the 1970's must know something about the age of computerization and how it affects his world. The author describes an automatic drafting system and its application, to aid technical educators, who will probably be responsible for the students' familiarity with computer or computer-related machines. (Author/AJ)

Written for beginners, this user's manual explains how to do microcomputer (MC) painting with the Microcomputer System for Educational Applications (MSEA) of the University of Illinois' Department of Secondary Education. It requires no knowledge of computers, and a step-by-step approach to the use of the many different tools used in this medium is…

Describes the hardware and some of the choropleth mapping software available for the IBM-PC, PC compatible and Apple II microcomputers. Reviewed are: Micromap II, Documap, Desktop Information Display System (DIDS) , Multimap, Execuvision, Iris Gis, Mapmaker, PC Map, Statmap, and Atlas Map. Vendors' addresses are provided. (JDH)