This study examined how seductive details affect on-line processing of a technical, scientific text. In Experiment 1, each sentence from the experimental text was rated for interest and importance. Participants rated seductive details as being more interesting but less important than main ideas. In Experiment 2, we examined the effect of seductive…

This study examined patterns of behavioral and emotional responses to conflict and cooperation in adolescents with anxiety/mood disorders and healthy peers. We compared performance on and emotional responses to the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game, an economic exchange task involving conflict and cooperation, between adolescents with…

Self-worth protective students characteristically perform poorly when they anticipate that poor performance is likely to reveal low ability, yet perform well in situations that involve little threat to self-worth. The present study sought a further understanding of this variable pattern of achievement, assessing two possibilities: (1) that the…

There is a common predicament faced by educational designers, that is, the lack of learning design tools for nontraditional pedagogies of learning. Because of this lack of alternatives, educational designers often use traditional design tools (such as task analysis) in contexts where nontraditional learning activities (such as collaborative…

Several visuo-motor tasks can be used to demonstrate biases towards left hemispace in schizophrenic patients, suggesting a minor right hemineglect. Recent studies in neglect patients used a new number bisection task to highlight a lateralized defect in their visuo-spatial representation of numbers. To test a possible lateralized representational…

Numerous studies show that children's language ability is related to false-belief understanding. However, there is considerable variation in the size of the correlation reported. Using data from 104 studies (N=8,891), this meta-analysis determines the strength of the relation in children under age 7 and examines moderators that may account for the…

Two tasks hypothesized to assess the efficiency of route selection were administered to 328 adults ranging from 18 to 93 years of age. Increased age was associated with slower completion of mazes, even after adjusting for differences in perceptual-motor speed, and with longer and less accurate routes in a task in which participants were asked to…

This study examined the relationships between metacognition, self-regulation and students' critical thinking skills and disposition in online Socratic Seminars for ninth grade World Geography and Culture students. Participants of this study came from six intact pre-AP (Pre-Advanced Placement) classes in a public high school in south central Texas…

Background: Children who meet language test criteria for specific language impairment (SLI) are not necessarily the same as those who are referred to a speech and language therapist. Aims: To consider how far this discrepancy reflects insensitivity of traditional language tests to clinically important features of language impairment. Methods &…

A comprehensive audit of the skills curriculum offered to students in a Bachelor of Laws program yielded important insights about the collective impact of assessment tasks on the hidden and operational skills curriculum. This qualitative case study supports the views (1) that assessment tasks provide significant skills practice and performance…

Among the challenges many teachers face in facilitating the improvement of speaking skills are sparing sufficient time for practice to enable students to achieve fluency in speaking through internalizing the structures, and establishing a balance between fluency and accuracy. This study aimed to seek an answer to the question as to whether…

In individuals with autism or autism-spectrum-disorder (ASD), conflicting results have been reported regarding the processing of biological motion tasks. As biological motion perception and recognition might be related to impaired imitation, gross motor skills and autism specific psychopathology in individuals with ASD, we performed a functional…

This paper is intended to investigate the interplay between proficiency and gender in the use of communication strategies. Sixty Iranian university male and female subjects studying English took part in the experiment and performed two tasks: word recognition and picture-story narration. The results indicate that proficiency had a more perceptible…

This study examined the effects of task difficulty on on-task behavior for four students exhibiting low levels of math performance and on-task behavior. Curriculum-based assessments were conducted with each student to define the difficulty level of math tasks for each student based on the individual's rate of accurate performance on computational…

Over the past 2 decades, research has demonstrated that learner collaboration facilitates second language (L2) acquisition (Lapkin, Swain, & Smith, 2002; McDonough, 2004; Storch, 1998, 2004; Swain & Lapkin, 1998). Adopting a sociocultural perspective (e.g., Swain & Lapkin, 1998), the current study compared the effectiveness of collaborative and…