Large-class English teaching is an inexorable trend in many Chinese universities and colleges, which leads to a strange and serious phenomenon that most students' English is ironically but vividly described as "the dumb English". Therefore, cultivating students' communicative skills and developing their language competence has become a…

The level of learners' expertise has been used as a metric and diagnostic mechanism of instruction. This metric influences mental effort directly according to the applications of cognitive load theory. Cognitive efficiency, an optimal measurement technique of expertise, was developed by Kalyuga and Sweller to replace instructional efficiency in…

The students at Newburgh Free Academy (NFA), a high school located in Newburgh, New York, organized their own "Dancing with the Teachers" contest in an effort to raise scholarship funds. Their creativity paid off. More than 850 tickets were sold at $5 each to attend this evening of entertainment, contributing more than $4,000 to…

This case study explains varied perspectives on a difficult dialogue. It provides recommendations for student affairs professionals and faculty members who work with students and teach courses in content areas that are related to diversity, social justice, and privilege.

This paper seeks to explore the actual educational setting, to see if there are appropriate conditions to develop Collective Capacity (CC) in educational institutions. It sees CC as the new land mark in work philosophy and presents a theoretical approach to the concept. Based on a theoretical framework, the authors underline what the primers for…

A wide range of developments in science in recent years has altered our views of our world and ourselves in significant ways. These views challenge the direction of applied science and technology in many fields, including those associated with learning and performance in organizations. At the same time, they open up opportunities and…

Research suggests that allowing individuals to control their own practice schedule has a positive effect on motor learning. In this experiment we examined the effect of task difficulty and self-regulated practice strategies on motor learning. The task was to move a mouse-operated cursor through pattern arrays that differed in two levels of…

Even though readability formulas are being used more widely than ever before in schools, libraries, businesses, newspapers, and government, there are critics who argue against their use. Criticism includes blaming the formulas for the "dumbing down" of textbooks, for being poor writers' guides, and for not taking into account the background or…

The ability of children during the first month of kindergarten to correctly recognize and identify the letters of the alphabet was examined. A total of 444 children were tested and only the data from children who could correctly recognize one or more, but less than 26, letters were analyzed. Children were grouped according to the number of letters…

Data are presented that challenge the difficulty ordering for anaphoric syntax (e.g., pronouns) proposed by Bormuth, Manning, Carr, and Pearson. It is suggested that any such difficulty ordering which results from tests of the form proposed by Bormuth has uncontrolled variability due to semantic factors that have yet to be carefully analyzed and…

The original version of the "Helen Keller Story" and a linguistically more complex version of it were used to test the hypothesis that reading comprehension is affected by the complexity of linguistic structures. Complexity was measured by four readability measures, the mean number of words per T-unit, and the Schmidt-Kittrell Linguistic…

Errors, or "bugs", in addition and subtraction problems of signed numbers are driven by misconceptions or incomplete knowledge at various components of procedural tasks, and result in erroneous rules of operation for carrying out computational problems. These rules, including the right one, are represented by the responses to a…

Many people tend to think of the economic problems of higher education as fiscal concern--as a business office problem in financial management. But the full scope of improvements needed in resources management to make higher education more cost-effective is much broader than mere financial control. A central part of resources management must deal…

Suggests that difficulty is a parameter of all cognitive tasks. Therefore, a search for the common mechanisms across tasks will lead to understanding of the system rather than understanding of only the paradigms. Uses earlier research by DeRosa and Morin (1967, 1970) in exploring retrieval strategy. (Author/RK)