With the current concern over the growing need for more engineers, there is an immediate need to improve freshman engineering retention. A working model for freshman engineering retention is needed. This paper proposes such a model based on Tinto's Interactionalist Theory. Emphasis in this model is placed on pre-college characteristics as…

Reading comprehension is a multidimensional process and a key component of this process is the activation of prior knowledge in the comprehension of text. This study utilized video clips as a means to anchor instruction and assist struggling middle-level readers in comprehending text. Participants in this study were 17 seventh- and eighth-grade…

To foster medical students' diagnostic knowledge a case-based worked example approach was implemented in the context of a computer-based learning environment. Thirty medical students were randomly assigned to the condition "with erroneous examples", and 31 students learned with correct examples. Diagnostic knowledge was operationalised…

The focus of this special issue is on the cognitive load underlying processes of interactive knowledge construction in a wide range of instructional multimedia platforms. Multimedia comprehension involves the parallel processing of auditory-verbal and visual-pictorial channels within working memory. By means of integrating multimodal information,…

This research examined the nature of parent-child conversations at an informal science education center housed in an active gravitational-wave observatory. Each of 20 parent-child dyads explored an interactive exhibit hall privately, without the distraction of other visitors. Parents employed a variety of strategies to support their children's…

Previous research [S. J. Pollock et al., Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 3, 1 (2007)] showed that despite the use of interactive engagement techniques, the gap in performance between males and females on a conceptual learning survey persisted from pretest to post-test at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Such findings were counter to…

Increasing the cultural and linguistic diversity of the teaching workforce in Australia was a key recommendation of the House of Representatives Standing Committee Inquiry into Teacher Education in their report, "Top of the Class" (written by L. Hartsuyker). The report reflects findings from national and international research that…

This study is aimed at investigating students' annotation behaviors and their effects on learning achievement with pre-reading (reading before class) exercises and Web-based sharing mechanisms. An 8-week quasi-experiment was conducted with 125 sixth-grade elementary school students. The study shows the following results. First, a significant…

While formats and conventions of scientific and technical writing vary from field to field, the transcendent requirement is precision, so that the work can be understood and, if necessary, reproduced. Science teachers undoubtedly tell students about the importance of precision in collecting data and analyzing results; what is less commonly…

The employment of practitioners and the expansion of distance education courses have become controversial issues in the preparation of school administrators. In large measure, both actions have been condemned by many senior professors, primarily because they believe that college administrators have pursued them for economic reasons rather than for…

For all students to become successful, productive citizens in the future, it is apparent that they must be well educated in technology. Those students who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds have further to go in attaining that education because they often do not have the capabilities at home to practice technology nor do they have the…

Formerly, the "prisoners" problem was used by the author in his teaching chiefly as a process activity, with the intention of promoting certain investigative techniques: the idea of starting with a smaller problem (say, 10 prisoners, guards and cells, rather 100), and the importance of finding an effective method for displaying what was going on.…

In the last 25 years, A-level Mathematics syllabi have changed very considerably, introducing a broader range of application areas but reducing the previous emphasis on classical mechanics. This article describes a baseline survey undertaken to establish in detail the entry levels in mechanics for the cohort of students entering Engineering…

Analogical reasoning is one mechanism that has been recognized as having the potential of bringing prior knowledge to bear on the acquisition of new information. Analogical reasoning involves the identification and transfer of structural information from a known system to a new and relatively unknown system. The productive use of analogy is often…

Noting that the sentence memory models formulated in the 1970s need to be altered so as to be consistent with the fact that people use prior knowledge to process new information, this report discusses issues to be considered in making such an alteration. The report focuses on three questions: (1) What conditions lead people to elaborate and…