This study sought to determine the effect of simulation-games environment on students' achievement in attitudes to mathematics in secondary school. Data was collected from a sample of 147 students in senior secondary school in Osun-State, Nigeria. t-test and analysis of variance was used to analyze the data collected for the study. The finding…

In the past decade, providing language instruction via computer-mediated communication (CMC) has seen tremendous growth throughout the world. With this increase in asynchronous instruction have come questions concerning the role of the instructor as it determines the quality and impact of learning and of what optimal faculty development might…

In the United States, people get very little news about Africa, and what news they do get is about war or famine, with little historical information or context. In this article, the authors describe how they developed and implemented a Pan-African Summit simulation project in order to give their approximately 100, 9th-grade students (in five World…

We develop the view that inflection is driven partly by non-phonological analogy and that non-phonological information is of particular importance to the inflection of non-canonical roots, which in the view of [Marcus, G. F., Brinkmann, U., Clahsen, H., Wiese, R., & Pinker, S. (1995). "German inflection: the exception that proves the rule."…

This article discusses a simulation wherein learners of Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL) in a business writing course at an American university are assigned tasks to write a series of business letters based on situations that are likely to occur in actual business settings. After an overview of the theoretical background, this article…

According to the hypothesis of misperception of feedback, people's poor performance in renewable resource management tasks can be attributed to their general tendency to systematically misperceive the dynamics of bioeconomic systems. The thesis of this article is that dynamic decision performance can be improved by helping individuals develop more…

This article critically reflects on the GUN CONTROL simulation (Salies, 1994a) by retaking ideas advanced by Salies (2002) and applying them to the context of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing classes in Brazil. It examines how controlled practice relates to learners' performance on the first draft in a simulation-based content unit…

This paper proposes a reconsideration of use of computer simulations in science education. We discuss three studies of the use of science simulations for undergraduate distance learning students. The first one, "The Driven Pendulum" simulation is a computer-based experiment on the behaviour of a pendulum. The second simulation, "Evolve" is…

The purpose of the current article is to examine the impact of laboratory demonstrations and computer visualizations on learning in a third-year fluid mechanics course at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). As a first step, on entering the course, students were exposed to a laboratory demonstration focusing on the nature of…

The development of immersive learning technologies in the form of virtual reality and advanced computer applications has meant that realistic creations of simulated environments are now possible. Such simulations have been used to great effect in training in the military, air force, and in medical training. But how realistic do problems need to be…

Words become associated following repeated co-occurrence episodes. This process might be further determined by the semantic characteristics of the words. The present study focused on how semantic and episodic factors interact in incidental formation of word associations. First, we found that human participants associate semantically related words…

Most researchers agree that psychological/educational tests are sensitive to multiple traits, implying the need for a multidimensional item response theory (MIRT). One limitation of applying a MIRT in practice is the difficulty in establishing equivalent scales of multiple traits. In this study, a new MIRT linking method was proposed and evaluated…

The impact of outliers on Cronbach's coefficient [alpha] has not been documented in the psychometric or statistical literature. This is an important gap because coefficient [alpha] is the most widely used measurement statistic in all of the social, educational, and health sciences. The impact of outliers on coefficient [alpha] is investigated for…

Dynamic factor models have been used to analyze continuous time series behavioral data. We extend 2 main dynamic factor model variations--the direct autoregressive factor score (DAFS) model and the white noise factor score (WNFS) model--to categorical DAFS and WNFS models in the framework of the underlying variable method and illustrate them with…

We describe a computer tutorial that introduces the concept of the steady state in enzyme kinetics. The tutorial allows students to produce graphs of the concentrations of free enzyme, enzyme-substrate complex, and product versus time in order to learn about the approach to steady state. By using a range of substrate concentrations and rate…