The main purpose of the study was to investigate the distinctness and reliability of analytic (or multi-trait) rating dimensions and their relationships to holistic scores and "e-rater"[R] essay feature variables in the context of the TOEFL[R] computer-based test (TOEFL CBT) writing assessment. Data analyzed in the study were holistic…

This study investigated navigation with route instructions generated by digital-map software and synthetic speech. The participants, either visually impaired or sighted wearing blindfolds, successfully located rooms in an unfamiliar building. Users with visual impairments demonstrated better route-finding performance when the technology provided…

Web-based applications offer teachers, students, and school districts a convenient way to accomplish a wide range of tasks, from accounting to word processing, for free. Cloud computing has the potential to offer staff and students better services at a lower cost than the technology deployment models they're using now. Saving money and improving…

Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) that employ a model-tracing methodology have consistently shown their effectiveness. However, what evidently makes these tutors effective, the cognitive model embedded within them, has traditionally been difficult to create, requiring great expertise and time, both of which come at a cost. Furthermore, an…

This article reports the results of a systematic and comprehensive evaluation of the suitability of 13 commercially available, authorized software programs for teaching reading and writing in the primary grades. These programs were assessed on interface design, content, instructional design, whether manufacturers' educational claims were supported…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect Serious Educational Games (SEGs) had on student interest in science in a federally funded game-based learning project. It can be argued that today's students are more likely to engage in video games than they are to interact in live, face-to-face learning environments. With a keen eye on…

The theme of EUROCALL 2014 was "CALL Design: Principles and Practice," which attracted approximately 280 practitioners, researchers and students from computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and related disciplines of more than 40 different nationalities. Over 170 presentations were delivered on topics related to this overarching…

"The NMC Horizon Report" series is the most visible outcome of the New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Project, an ongoing research effort established in 2002 that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within every sector of education in some 65…

The national movement towards progress files, incorporating personal development planning and reflective learning, is supported by lecturers providing effective feedback to their students. Recent technological advances mean that higher education tutors are no longer obliged to return comments in the "traditional" manner, by annotating…

In this paper, we present a synchronous text-based communication tool, referred to as Adaptive Communication Tool (ACT), which provides capabilities for adaptation and personalization. ACT supports both the free and the structured form of dialogue. The structured dialogue is implemented by two types of Scaffolding Sentence Templates (SST); i.e.…

Since 2002 the "Zurich E-Learning Certificate" offers lecturers and academic staff from the three main universities in Zurich the possibility to take part in a professional development program which supports the acquirement of eCompetence. The program is the result of a cooperation between the University of Zurich (UZH), the Swiss…

This article presents the features, design and architecture of the Myst pervasive game platform that has been applied in creating pervasive mobile learning games in various contexts such as science festivals and museums in Finland. Based on our experiences with the development, we draw a set of design principles for creating successfully a…

Writing programs and more specifically, Writing in the Disciplines (WID) initiatives have begun to embrace the use of and the ideology inherent to, open source software. The Conference on College Composition and Communication has passed a resolution stating that whenever feasible educators and their institutions consider open source applications.…

Collective communication allows efficient communication and synchronization among a collection of processes, unlike point-to-point communication that only involves a pair of communicating processes. Achieving high performance for both kernels and full-scale applications running on a distributed memory system requires an efficient implementation of…

"Reflective Database Access Control" (RDBAC) is a model in which a database privilege is expressed as a database query itself, rather than as a static privilege contained in an access control list. RDBAC aids the management of database access controls by improving the expressiveness of policies. However, such policies introduce new interactions…