In this article, we outline the need to draw upon multiple contexts to gain meaningful understanding of factors that have a significant bearing upon student achievement motivation and engagement. In calling for theoretical approaches that can accommodate the complexities involved, we suggest that Bronfenbrenner's bioecological theory offers…

The present study focused on the first step in developing a cue reactivity task for studying cognitive biases in individuals with mild to borderline intellectual disability (ID) and alcohol use-related problems: the standardization of pictorial stimuli. Participants (N = 40), both with and without a history of alcohol use-related problems and…

The current research compared the ability of adults and children to determine where another person is looking in shared visual space (triadic gaze). In Experiment 1, children (6-, 8-, 10-, and 14-year-olds) and adults viewed photographs of a model fixating a series of positions separated by 1.6 degrees along the horizontal plane. The task was to…

Nonreading tasks that share some (but not all) of the task demands of reading have often been used to make inferences about how cognition influences when the eyes move during reading. In this article, we use variants of the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading to simulate eye-movement behavior in several of these tasks, including…

Adults make erroneous predictions about object fall despite recognizing when observed displays are correct or incorrect. Prediction requires explicit engagement with conceptual knowledge, whereas recognition can be achieved through tacit processing. Therefore, it has been suggested that the greater challenge imposed by explicit engagement leads to…

Two studies were conducted on block building in adolescents, assessing middle school (Study 1) and high school students (Study 2). Students were asked to build something interesting with blocks. In both samples, the same pattern of gender differences were found; boys built taller structures than girls, and balanced a larger number of blocks on a…

Personality traits are believed to affect both learner ability and group dynamics and cohesion. Another central element influencing how individuals perform in group settings stems from their motivation to collaborate. This article explores the relationship between personality traits, motivation for collaboration and participation of university…

This paper reports the results of a group intervention based on strategies derived from the systemic therapy model--brief strategic therapy. These strategies aimed at decreasing the anxiety levels commonly found in oral performance tasks related to L2 learning. Thirteen students from different semesters who belonged to two foreign language…

Due to demographic changes, there is a growing number of adolescent students who learn in classrooms in which their teacher and peers come from cultural and linguistic backgrounds that are different from theirs. In these diverse classrooms, teachers need to be able to facilitate language learning spaces that are welcoming for all children,…

Integration of technology in task-based language teaching (TBLT) has long been a source of attraction for language teachers (Pierson, 2015). In the case of developing countries, such as Pakistan, mobile phones are the modern form of technology commonly available at low cost to individuals as well as institutions. The present descriptive case study…

The use of integrated skills tasks in language tests has been debated for many years and international English test developers such as Educational Testing Service (ETS) and Pearson Tests of English (PTE) already use such tests to assess English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' language proficiency. Empirical research has rarely investigated…

This study examines the effects of foreign language learning context (three-month study-abroad; versus "at-home" instruction) and age (10-11-year-old children versus university students) on the development of effective foreign language communication strategies (CS) in monologue production. Participants (N = 95) were all Spanish/Catalan…

Digital Storytelling offers many advantages for language learning, especially within a project-based framework. In this article, the use of Digital Micro-Narratives is proposed as particularly useful for second language learners at the novice level. As a sub-genre of Digital Storytelling, Digital Micro-Narratives focus more on frequently updated…

The present study had two main goals: to explore performance differences in a task-based environment between face-to-face (FTF) and oral computer-mediated communication (OCMC) groups, and to investigate the relationship between trait-like willingness to communicate (WTC) and performance in the FTF and OCMC groups. Students from two intact…

There is accumulating evidence that training on working memory (WM) generalizes to other nontrained domains, and there are reports of transfer effects extending as far as to measures of fluid intelligence. Although there have been several demonstrations of such transfer effects in young adults and children, they have been difficult to demonstrate…