Arizona Online Instruction (AOI) provided an instructional alternative to nearly fifty thousand K-12 students in Arizona during the 2012-2013 school year. Growth in online education underscores the importance of evolving the role of the K-12 virtual teacher as the human agent (Turvey, 2008) demonstrating social learning theory (Bandura, 1977) by…

Virtual worlds are an important tool in modern education practices as well as providing socialisation, entertainment and a laboratory for collaborative work. This paper focuses on the uses of virtual worlds for education and synthesises over 100 published academic papers, reports and educational websites from around the world. A taxonomy is then…

Estimation of item response model parameters and ability distribution parameters has been, and will remain, an important topic in the educational testing field. Much research has been dedicated to addressing this task. Some studies have focused on item parameter estimation when the latent ability was assumed to follow a normal distribution,…

We observed 11 undergraduates in an experiment designed to simulate infant caregiving. In negative reinforcement conditions experienced by all participants, a targeted caregiving response (e.g., rocking a baby doll) produced escape from, and avoidance of, a recorded infant cry. Nine participants' caregiving was shown to be controlled by this…

In this paper, the statistical significance of the contribution of variables to the principal components in principal components analysis (PCA) is assessed nonparametrically by the use of permutation tests. We compare a new strategy to a strategy used in previous research consisting of permuting the columns (variables) of a data matrix…

Real-time classroom simulations like TeachME, a University of Central Florida project, offer promise for a host of teacher-training applications. Through them, candidates could learn to work with different groups of students, or practice a discrete skill such as classroom management. Most of all, such simulations give teachers in training the…

To gain insight in the social processes that underlie knowledge sharing in teams, this article questions which team learning behaviors lead to the construction of a shared mental model. Additionally, it explores how the development of shared mental models mediates the relation between team learning behaviors and team effectiveness. Analyses were…

This study investigated how population parameters representing heterogeneity of variance, skewness, kurtosis, bimodality, and outlier-proneness, drawn from normal and eleven non-normal distributions, also characterized the ranks corresponding to independent samples of scores. When the parameters of population distributions from which samples were…

Neuroanatomy is a difficult subject in medical education, with students often feeling worried and anxious before they have even started, potentially decreasing their engagement with the subject. At the University of Southampton, we incorporated the use of Twitter as a way of supporting students' learning on a neuroanatomy module to evaluate how it…

Recent studies have shown that simulation games may be useful tools for supporting foreign language education. However, much of this research has focused on games using 3D graphic technology, which entail technical requirements that may render them too complex for use in many educational contexts. Accordingly, we wanted to determine if less…

Trend estimation in international comparative large-scale assessments relies on measurement invariance between countries. However, cross-national differential item functioning (DIF) has been repeatedly documented. We ran a simulation study using national item parameters, which required trends to be computed separately for each country, to compare…

Drawing from research on situated cognition and the development of expertise and simulations in professional education, we designed two simulation tasks that provided novice teachers with repeated opportunities to deliberately practice managing a classroom under no-fault conditions. The simulations immersed novices in two perennial classroom…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to contend that collegiate programs should carefully plan their capstone courses in light of the educational mission, pedagogical content knowledge, instructional techniques and delivery formats. Design/methodology/approach: This is a concept paper with elements of theory building from the case of business…

This qualitative study indicates that Chinese origin students completing their pre-university education in a British school have particular difficulties related to sociocultural change, pedagogical differences, affective aspects, cognitive demand and language learning. These are discussed. The use of a pre-laboratory software resource to support…

This study investigated the effect of an intervention regarding the use of simulations in science teaching on primary school preservice science teachers' (n = 36) self-assessed technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK). The connection of their self-assessed TPACK on their views on the usefulness of simulations in science teaching…