This project incorporates technology and a historical emphasis on science drawn from ancient civilizations to promote a greater understanding of conceptual science. In the Apps for Ancient Civilizations project, students investigate an ancient culture to discover how people might have used science and math smartphone apps to make their lives…

The Monty Hall dilemma (MHD) is a remarkably difficult probability problem with a counterintuitive solution. Undergraduate students used an interactive digital learning object that provided a set-based, animated explanation of the solution to the MHD and let them play games designed to increase understanding of the solution. More than 60% of users…

The increasing ease and ubiquity of video has resulted in a proliferation of video annotation tools used and designed for improving education. While similar, each tool has its relative strengths and weaknesses. Choosing the "right" tool can have an impact on the experience of teachers and the effectiveness of video as a means for improving…

In this article, the author describes a sticky-note mural project that originated from his desire to incorporate contemporary materials into his assignments as well as to inspire collaboration between students. The process takes much more than sticking sticky notes to the wall. It takes critical thinking skills and teamwork to design and complete…

In this paper, prediction markets are presented as an innovative pedagogical tool which can be used to create a Rich Environment for Active Learning (REAL). Prediction markets are designed to make forecasts about specific future events by using a market mechanism to aggregate the information held by a large group of traders about that event into a…

This thesis describes a generative model for representing disfluent phenomena in human speech. This model makes use of observed syntactic structure present in disfluent speech, and uses a right-corner transform on syntax trees to model this structure in a very natural way. Specifically, the phenomenon of speech repair is modeled by explicitly…

Technology and its uses have undergone significant change in the past several decades. Although the technology of 2010 has changed in ways unimaginable in 1960, the promise of technology today is similar to the promise of technology then. The achievement of student learning seems more likely to lie in the minds of the people who use the technology…

Differences in insect morphology and movement during singing provide a fascinating opportunity for students to investigate insects while learning about the characteristics of sound. In the activities described here, students use a free online computer software program to explore the songs of the major singing insects and experiment with making…

Evaluative learning is said to differ from Pavlovian associative learning in that it reflects stimulus contiguity, not contingency. Thus, evaluative learning should not be subject to stimulus competition, a proposal tested in the current experiments. Participants were presented in elemental and compound training phases with pictures of shapes as…

This article reviews theory and research relevant to the development of digital immersive virtual environment-based instructional computing systems. The review is organized within the context of a multidimensional model of social influence and interaction within virtual environments that models the interaction of four theoretical factors: theory…

Online virtual worlds are becoming important tools in foreign/second language instruction in view of the fact that they enhance learner motivation, promote autonomy and social presence in a 3D environment. Virtual worlds are a type of reality in which students can meet and communicate with other learners in the target language using text, voice or…

Recent studies of learner interaction in virtual worlds have tended to select basic tasks involving open-ended communication. There is evidence that such tasks are supportive of language acquisition, however it may also be beneficial to consider more complex tasks. Research in task-based learning has identified features such as non-linguistic…

This article describes an Oakland Unified schools program of "blended learning" that is designed to reach students who are academically all over the map. Blended learning combines brick-and-mortar schooling with online education "with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace" of learning. The program…

Research has documented the use of tools in computer-based learning environments as problematic, that is, learners do not use the tools and when they do, they tend to do it suboptimally. This study attempts to disentangle cause and effect of this suboptimal tool use for experienced learners. More specifically, learner variables (metacognitive and…

In this study the impact of computer immersion on performance of school leavers Senior Certificate mathematics scores was investigated across 31 schools in the EMDC East education district of Cape Town, South Africa by comparing performance between two groups: a control and an experimental group. The experimental group (14 high schools) had access…