The purpose of our study was to examine the ways in which parents engage in play with their children within the family context and to establish which parental play behaviour predicts the play behaviour of their children during interactive play with toys. The sample included 58 children from 2;6 to 6 years old and their parents. The parent-child…

Listening closely to what students say about their school experiences can be beneficial to educators for understanding and addressing school-related topics and problems and rethinking policies and practices. The purpose of this toolkit is to provide educators with a purposeful and systematic way to elicit and listen to student voice to inform…

Developing technology to help people teach and learn is an important topic in Human Computer Interaction (HCI). In this thesis we present three studies on this topic. In the first study, we demonstrate new games for learning mathematics and discuss the evidence for key design decisions from user studies. In the second study, we develop a real-time…

The objective of this research was to conduct a meta-analysis to examine existing research studies on video modeling as an effective teaching tool for children and adolescents diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Study eligibility criteria included (a) single case research design using multiple baselines, alternating treatment designs,…

Social skills and communication for students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are a challenging area in spite of many years of research and interventions. Whilst the vast majority of strategies and interventions reported in the literature for students with ASD are teacher/expert-generated, this study focuses on the use of technology to create…

Pre-recorded lectures (podcasts) and recordings of live lectures (lecture-capture) are now everyday occurrences on many college campuses. Student use and opinions of these technologies have been frequently studied. However, there has been little reported on how faculty perceive these technologies. This article reports the results from a 2010…

This paper describes the outcomes of a qualitative investigation into the range of different approaches that students use to solve open-ended, context rich problems. The study involved a small cohort of students individually solving open-ended, context-rich problems using a think aloud protocol. The problems required the students to develop a…

The use of video to assist with ethnographical-based research is not a new phenomenon. Recent advances in technology have reduced the costs and technical expertise required to use videos for gathering research data. Audio-visual records of learning activities as they take place, allow for many non-vocal and inter-personal communication…

This study brought together 2 literatures--gesturing and executive function--in order to examine the possible role of gesture in children's executive function. Children (N = 41) aged 2½-6 years performed a sorting-shift executive function task (Dimensional Change Card Sort). Responses of interest included correct sorting, response latency,…

With the present research, the authors examined whether reminders could maintain 18-month-olds' memories generated from picture books and videos. Infants (N = 98) were shown a series of target actions in a picture book or on video. Either 24 hr or 2 weeks prior to a 4-week deferred imitation test, they were exposed to a reminder, a partial…

This article outlines the approach used to develop a scheme to characterize the nature and quality of specific practices of one-to-one teaching, selected on the basis of their potential significance to the development of student performance. Although the value of one-to-one teaching remains largely unchallenged at the conservatoire level, music…

This article discusses the use of gesture and body-movement in the teaching of singing and reports on a survey amongst professional singing teachers in Germany regarding their use of gesture and body movement as pedagogic tools in their teaching. The nomenclature of gestures and movements used in the survey is based on a previous study by the…

Teaching prismatic colours usually boils down to establishing the take-home message that white light consists of "differently refrangible" coloured rays. This approach explains the classical spectrum of seven colours but has its limitations, e.g. in discussing spectra from setups with higher resolution or in understanding the well…

Renewed interest in growing and purchasing locally grown foods quadrupled requests for food preservation classes. Economic times tightened budgets, decreasing staffing levels of Extension educators. Offering options via the Internet was a natural progression to meet the increased demand. Extension educators created 20 5-minute online video--like…

An exercise is described in which second year undergraduate bioscientists write a reflective commentary on the ethical implications of a recent biological/biomedical news story of their own choosing. As well as being of more real-world relevance than writing in a traditional essay format, the commentaries also have potential utility in helping the…