Purpose: The primary purpose of this study is to assess the predicting role of job characteristics on job performance. Dimensions in the job characteristics construct are skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback. Further, work involvement is tested as a mediator in the hypothesized link. Design/methodology/approach: A…

Children are active learners: they learn not only from the information people offer and the evidence they happen to observe, but by actively seeking information. However, children's information search strategies are typically less efficient than those of adults. In two studies, we isolate potential sources of developmental change in how children…

The study investigated the effect of problem-based learning through cognition-based tasks on speaking proficiency of Iranian intermediate EFL learners in comparison to the effect of objective-based tasks. To this end, a true experimental research design was employed. Ninety five (N = 95) language learners studying at a language institute in the…

This study aims to clarify the relationship between task types and foreign language learners' social presence (SP) in text-based SCMC learning modes. The participants in this study comprised 38 high-intermediate level English as a foreign language (EFL) learners from different disciplines of a university in Taiwan. They were divided into two…

Adult second language (L2) learners have often been found to produce discourse that manifests limited and non-native-like use of multiword expressions. One explanation for this is that adult L2 learners are relatively unsuccessful (in the absence of pedagogic intervention) at transferring multiword expressions from input texts to their own output…

The aim of the present work was to analyze the influence of self-controlled task difficulty on motor learning. Participants had to intercept three targets falling at different velocities by displacing a stylus above a digitizer. Task difficulty corresponded to racquet width. Half the participants (self-control condition) could choose the racquet…

Inhibitory control and monitoring abilities of Hebrew-English bilingual and English monolingual university students were compared, in a paradigm requiring participants to switch between performing three distinct tasks. Inhibitory control was gauged by lag-2 task repetition costs, namely decreased performance on the final trial of sequences of type…

To account for the findings obtained in voluntary task switching, this article describes and tests the chain-retrieval model. This model postulates that voluntary task selection involves retrieval of task information from long-term memory, which is then used to guide task selection and task execution. The model assumes that the retrieved…

Research into human decision-making has often sidestepped the question of search despite its importance across a wide range of domains such as search for food, mates, allies, visual targets or information. Recently, research on decisions from experience has made progress in finding out how individual characteristics shape search for information.…

Recasts are the most commonly studied type of corrective feedback in interaction research and lately the investigation has extended to what makes recasts beneficial or unbeneficial. Expanding the investigation to the effect of different types of recasts (i.e., declarative or interrogative) on learners' noticing, the present study reports the…

In this article, we demonstrate that planning tasks enhance recall when the context of planning (a) is self-referential and (b) draws on familiar scenarios represented in episodic memory. Specifically, we show that when planning tasks are sorted according to the degree to which they evoke memories of personally familiar scenarios (e.g., planning a…

Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have identified activation in the prefrontal-parietal-sub-cortical circuit during feigned memory impairment when comparing with truthful telling. Here, we used fMRI to determine whether neural activity can differentiate between answering correctly, answering randomly, answering…

Three experiments investigated whether the hypercorrection effect--the finding that errors committed with high confidence are easier, rather than more difficult, to correct than are errors committed with low confidence--occurs in grade school children as it does in young adults. All three experiments showed that Grade 3-6 children hypercorrected…

Mathematics lessons can take a variety of formats. In this article, the authors discuss lessons organized around complex mathematical tasks. These lessons usually unfold in three phases. First, the task is introduced to students. Second, students work on solving the task. Third, the teacher "orchestrates" a concluding whole-class discussion in…

Many patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) are impaired in syntactic production. Because most previous studies of expressive syntax in PPA have relied on quantitative analysis of connected speech samples, which is a relatively unconstrained task, it is not well understood which specific syntactic structures are most challenging for these…