Speculates about the presence of a negative Hawthorne effect on a control group in addition to a positive effect on the experimental group in an experiment involving 2 first-grade teachers and their classes, and draws implications for studies which seek to control for possible interference by positive and negative Hawthorne effects. Bibliography.…

Looks at lessons learned from the Alum Rock voucher experiment and at the current politics of educational vouchers. Condensed from a report of the same name, published by the Center for Social Organization of Schools, The Johns Hopkins University (Report No. 307, March 1981). (Editor/SJL)

Indicates the range of purposes and variety of settings in which design experiments have been conducted, delineating five crosscutting features that collectively differentiate design experiments from other methodologies. Clarifies what is involved in preparing for and carrying out a design experiment and in conducting a retrospective analysis of…

Explores how the emerging goals, approaches, and methodologies of design experiments might be productively combined with methods of inquiry common in more traditional laboratory science, considering the potential benefits of such a dialectic. Presents three examples of collaboration and describes steps toward productive exchange (identifying…

Rolling dice and tossing coins can still be used to teach probability even if students know (or think they know) what happens in these experiments. This article considers many simple variations of these experiments which are interesting, potentially enjoyable and challenging. Using these variations can cause students (and teachers) to think again…

In recent years, propensity score matching (PSM) has gained attention as a potential method for estimating the impact of public policy programs in the absence of experimental evaluations. In this study, we evaluate the usefulness of PSM for estimating the impact of a program change in an educational context (Tennessee's Student Teacher Achievement…

In this article, the authors present and test a formal model that holds that people use information about category boundaries in estimating inexactly represented stimuli. Boundaries restrict stimuli that are category members to fall within a particular range. This model posits that people increase the average accuracy of stimulus estimates by…

This paper reports the results of a study which aimed to investigate how ubiquitous games influence English learning achievement and motivation through a context-aware ubiquitous learning environment. An English curriculum was conducted on a school campus by using a context-aware ubiquitous learning environment called the Handheld English Language…

College students viewed a short multimedia PowerPoint presentation consisting of 16 narrated slides explaining lightning formation (Experiment 1) or 8 narrated slides explaining how a car's braking system works (Experiment 2). Each slide appeared for approximately 8-10 s and contained a diagram along with 1-2 sentences of narration spoken in a…

Klin et al., 2004 and Levine et al., 2000 concluded that readers fail to resolve noun phrase anaphors when the antecedent is difficult to retrieve from memory and the inference is not necessary for comprehension. In four experiments we investigated the hypothesis that these inferences were actually partially encoded. Although the results of a…

Relation priming is a phenomenon in which comprehension of a word pair (e.g., COPPER HORSE) is facilitated by the prior presentation of another word pair (e.g., GLASS EYE) that instantiates the same conceptual relation (i.e., "composed of"). We investigated whether relation priming is contingent on lexical similarity. Study 1 revealed that…

Article concentrated on an experiment in multidisciplinary and intercultural research cooperation which involved the building up of the national law of Indonesia. (Author/RK)

A group of art students at Belleville Township (Illinois) High School West recently discovered what important roles well-trained senses of touch and muscle movement play. (Author)