Most studies in the field of synchronous Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) deal with interactions between language learners, while interactions between native speakers (NS) and learners have not been explored to the same extent, particularly to ascertain whether chatting with NS can provide a pedagogically sound bridge to conversation. Through…

Web-based learning environments are a great asset only if they are designed well and used as intended. The urgency to create courses in response to the growing demand for online learning has resulted in a hurried push to drop PowerPoint notes into Web-based course management systems (WBCMSs), devise an electronic quiz, put together a few…

The Association of Research Libraries' (ARL) E-Metrics Project is an ongoing effort to develop new measures that describe and measure networked electronic resources and also to underscore the need for measuring the value of such resources. This article presents results from an ongoing iterative qualitative study with the following goals: (a) to…

An experiment was conducted to examine whether perceptual information, specifically the shape of objects, is activated during semantic processing. Subjects judged whether a target word was related to a prime word. Prime-target pairs that were not associated, but whose referents had similar shapes (e.g. LADDER-RAILROAD) yielded longer ''no''…

This article explores psychometric characteristics of the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey (YRBS), one of the most widely used instruments to assess the prevalence of violent and other high-risk behaviors in secondary school settings. Response patterns were analyzed for a subset of 414 youths who indicated that they had carried a weapon to…

This study examined the influence of survey validity screening on the results from three group-administered school surveys administered to samples totaling approximately 5500 students in 19 schools. The estimated levels of risk behaviors, antisocial behaviors, and victim experiences were substantially reduced when respondents who gave multiple…

I discuss the contributions of Harvey Siegel, Francis Schrag and Randall Curren to this volume. Their articles cast in bold relief the relation of High Stakes Testing to the goals of education, the nature of mind and the demands of justice. I argue that the connections are deep, but that the considerations these authors raise do not show that High…

The inspiration for our project arose from a perceived gap between research in foreign/second language learning and classroom practice. In order to address this issue, we created a web site containing summaries of seminal articles in the area of CALL--computer assisted language learning. The summaries are useful for many teachers who do not have…

This study used Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to develop a teacher-friendly model for understanding the relationship between children's exposure to traumatic events, such as violence exposure, and their school achievement. With a sample of 146 urban elementary (grades 2-5) children, three variables (mental health behaviors,…

Sexual harassment is commonplace in schools, particularly among adolescents. Although information on this topic is typically gathered from students and teachers, this study collected information from school bus drivers. Based on feedback from 58 school bus drivers, 39 (67%) reported observing students making sexual comments or jokes. Almost half…

In this paper, experiments on the automatic discrimination of basic emotions from spoken Finnish are described. For the purpose of the study, a large emotional speech corpus of Finnish was collected; 14 professional actors acted as speakers, and simulated four primary emotions when reading out a semantically neutral text. More than 40 prosodic…

More than sixty years ago, John Dewey and Louise Rosenblatt produced theoretical work that challenged prevailing assumptions concerning art and aesthetic experience. Today, their work continues to be relevant and particularly useful for exploring the troubled interface between literary scholarship and classroom practice. Rereading Dewey and…

The objective of this study is to explore the feelings and emotions of deaf adolescents. The study examines the emotional domain of 34 prelingual severely and profoundly deaf adolescents, matched by sex and age with hearing class peers. A sentence completion task (Loeb and Sarigiani, 1986) is employed to assess such feelings as happiness, sadness,…

Swain's (1985, 1995, 2000) output hypothesis states that language production is facilitative of second language (L2) learning. An important component of the output hypothesis involves "pushing" learners to produce appropriate, accurate, and complex language (Swain, 1993), which may occur when interlocutors provide learners with negative feedback…

The two questions in this chapter are whether school restructuring promotes or constrains the professional development of teachers and which mechanisms for workplace learning appear to enhance the capacity of teachers to critically interpret educational reforms. To answer the first question, the implementation of structural changes and…