Recently, educators and policymakers have taken steps to improve high school graduation rates. Their efforts have already led to a record 83.2 percent graduation rate in 2016 and a 40 percent reduction over the past decade in the number of high schools graduating less than 6 in 10 students. Yet significant challenges for high schools remain.…

This paper discusses my experiences taking a semester's worth of undergraduate courses in order to determine the literacy task demands placed on students in the classroom. It has been well documented that students struggle with literacy tasks when they enter college. My experiences indicated that part of this struggle might be because reading…

Research on the learning and teaching of science is an important field for scholarly inquiry by faculty in science departments. Such research has proved to be an efficient means for improving the effectiveness of instruction in physics. A basic topic in introductory physics is used to illustrate how discipline-based education research has helped…

The concept of readability has had a variable history, moving from a position where it was considered as a very important topic for those responsible for producing texts and matching those texts to the abilities and needs of learners, to its current declining visibility in the education literature. Some important work has been coming from the USA…

Although it is speculated that impairments associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) will adversely affect driving performance, little is known about the actual extent and nature of the presumed deficits. Ten males (18-24 years of age) with a diagnosis of high functioning autism and 10 age matched community controls were recruited for a…

Helping students develop a sound understanding of scientific concepts can be a major challenge. Lately, learning progressions have received increasing attention as a means to support students in developing understanding of core scientific concepts. At the center of a learning progression is a sequence of developmental levels reflecting an…

Romanized transliteration is widely used in internet communication and global commerce, yet we know little about its behavioural and neural processing. Here, we show that Romanized text imposes a significant neurocognitive load. Readers faced greater difficulty in identifying concrete words written in Romanized transliteration (Romanagari)…

The Zooniverse projects turn everyday people into "citizen scientists" who work online with real data to assist scientists in conducting research on a variety of topics related to galaxies, exoplanets, lunar craters, and solar flares, among others. This paper describes our initial study to assess the conceptual knowledge and reasoning…

The article tests the assumption that forgetting in working memory for verbal materials is caused by time-based decay, using the complex-span paradigm. Participants encoded 6 letters for serial recall; each letter was preceded and followed by a processing period comprising 4 trials of difficult visual search. Processing duration, during which…

A dysfunction in predictive motor timing is put forward to underlie DCD-related motor problems. Predictive timing allows for the pre-selection of motor programmes (except "program" in computers) in order to decrease processing load and facilitate reactions. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), this study investigated the neural…

Standard 10 of the Common Core State Standards attends to students' capacity with complex text. This standard distinguishes the Common Core State Standards from previous standards documents. This article describes a process--the Text Complexity Multi-Index (TCMI)--that supports teachers in studying texts to support their students in…

This study examined the effects of interactive note-taking, a method that relies on student interaction with teacher-provided notes, on student test scores and critical thinking skills in the high-school Spanish classroom. It also examined how interactive notetaking affected students' confidence in note-taking and critical thinking skills and…

A societal shift from print-based to digital texts has afforded the ability to embed reader support within an instructional text. Numerous factors make eBooks an attractive option for colleges and universities, though undergraduates consistently reaffirm a preference for print-based materials. Given that many undergraduates arrive to college with…

The purpose of this study is to explore the feasibility and effectiveness of a scalable concept map based navigation system for a digital textbook. A literature review has been conducted to identify possible methods to promote conceptual understanding in the context of a digital textbook, and these hypothesized solutions will be evaluated through…

Internet-enabled mobile devices have increased the accessibility of learning content for students. Given the ubiquitous nature of mobile computing technology, a thorough understanding of the acceptance factors that impact a learner's intention to use mobile technology as an augment to their studies is warranted. Student acceptance of mobile…