The use of driving simulators is an innovation for police training in Quebec. There are some issues related to their impact on training objectives. This article presents the results of a study involving 71 police cadets who participated in six training sessions with a driving simulator. The training sessions were designed for developing the…

Contemporary evidence on the effectiveness of concrete and abstract representations in science education is based solely on studies conducted in college context. There it has been found that learning with abstract representations produces predominantly better outcomes than learning with concrete representations and combining the representations…

Many studies have previously focused on how people with different levels of expertise solve physics problems. In early work, focus was on characterising differences between experts and novices and a key finding was the central role that propositionally expressed principles and laws play in expert, but not novice, problem-solving. A more recent…

We shift the view of a special needs student away from the acknowledged view, that is as a student who requires interventions to restore a currently expected functioning behaviour, introducing a new paradigm to frame special needs students' learning of mathematics. We use the theory of objectification and the new paradigm to look at (and…

Three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds have been used for more than a decade in higher education for teaching and learning. Since the 1980s, academics began using virtual worlds as an exciting and innovative new technology to provide their students with new learning experiences that were difficult to provide any other way. But since that time,…

Several theoretical models have been constructed to determine the effects of buisness simulation games (BSGs) on learning performance. Although these models agree on the concept of learning-cycle effect, no empirical evidence supports the claim that the use of learning cycle activities with BSGs produces an effect on incremental gains in knowledge…

The advent of integrated multidisciplinary research has given rise to some of the most important breakthroughs of our time, but has also set significant challenges to the current educational paradigm. Current academic education often limits cross-discipline discussion, depends on close-ended problems, and restricts utilization of interdisciplinary…

This study examines key aspects of the cost-effectiveness of private nondoctoral (PND) colleges as providers of baccalaureate degrees and explores how states might feasibly make better use of these colleges to produce more degrees efficiently. The study looks at degree production and cost in the PND sector relative to other higher education…

Most current debate on instructional technology is characterized either by grandiose speculation on the salvation of education through automation (without specification of "what" and "how" technological innovations will actually be introduced in specific classroom situations, and how the changes will be financed), or by jargon-filled hairsplitting…

Complex navigation (e.g. indoor and outdoor environments) can be studied as a system-of-systems problem. The model is made up of disparate systems that can aid a user in navigating from one location to another, utilizing whatever sensor system or information is available. By using intelligent navigation sensors and techniques (e.g. RFID, Wifi,…

Testing is an important stage of teaching as it can assist teachers in auditing students' learning results. A good test is able to accurately reflect the capability of a learner. Nowadays, Computer-Assisted Testing (CAT) is greatly improving traditional testing, since computers can automatically and quickly compose a proper test sheet to meet user…

Identification accuracy for the second of two target (T2) is impaired when presented shortly after the first (T1). Does this attentional blink (AB) also impair the perception of the order of presentation? In four experiments, three letter targets (T1, T2, T3) were inserted in a stream of digit distractors displayed in rapid serial visual…

Localist models of spreading activation (SA) and models assuming distributed representations offer very different takes on semantic priming, a widely investigated paradigm in word recognition and semantic memory research. In this study, we implemented SA in an attractor neural network model with distributed representations and created a unified…

Jody F. Manning has been a superintendent in New York for more than 20 years, but his experience didn't make his conversation with the woman across the table any easier. "Terry Jones" had made three increasingly urgent phone calls asking to meet about her daughter, whose grades have been dropping precipitously. Jones talked about her…

The last decades have seen a growing interest in the impact of action on perception and other concurrent cognitive processes. One particularly interesting example is that manual rotation actions facilitate mental rotations in the same direction. The present study extends this research in two fundamental ways. First, Experiment 1 demonstrates that…