Background: Engineering practice is meant to advance the human condition, yet curricula do not appear to fully promote the human-centered philosophy of engineering in implementation. The educational system may inadvertently signal to students that engineering is a career choice better suited for those preferring to work with things rather than…

Few studies have evaluated the use of assessment to identify the most efficient instructional practices for individuals with autism spectrum disorder. This is problematic as these individuals often have difficulty acquiring skills, and the procedures that may be efficient with one individual may not be for others. The experimenters conducted…

This article provides a commentary within the special issue, Integration: The Keystone of Comprehension. According to most contemporary frameworks, a driving force in comprehension is the reader's ability to generate the links among the words and sentences (ideas) in the texts and between the ideas in the text and what the readers already know. As…

Block-building skills at age 3 are related to spatial skills at age 5 and spatial skills in grade school are linked to later success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Though studies have focused on block-building behaviors and design complexity, few have examined these variables in relation to future spatial and…

Using data with detailed instructor employment information from a state college system, this study examines disciplinary variations in the characteristics and effects of non-tenure-track faculty hired through temporary and long-term employment. We identify substantial differences in the demographic and employment characteristics between the two…

The recent decades have seen enthusiastic calls for reconceptualizing English as a foreign language (EFL) education, taking into account the current socio-lingual status of English and how it is used "genuinely" for communication interculturally and internationally. However, a wide gap still exists between promulgation such as…

In the higher education (HE) landscape worldwide, team teaching has become increasingly common. The growing prevalence of team teaching in HE has mainly been driven by the necessity to cope with larger classes, workload requirements, and the complexity of delivering multi-disciplinary courses or to provide a more stable quality of course portfolio…

Background: The most challenging task in eye-tracking-based multimedia research is to establish a relationship between eye-tracking metrics (or cognitive processes) and learners' performance scores. Additionally, there are current debates about the effectiveness of animations (or simulations) in promoting learning in multimedia settings.…

This study investigated whether task instruction affected comprehension of multiple conflicting-view texts after controlling for a number of individual difference variables and whether the effects of task instruction varied as a result of post-reading assessment tasks. Recruited from a First-Year Composition course, 64 participants received a task…

Research suggests that social networking sites may provide a viable context for promoting student involvement. We examined the relations between social and academic Facebook use and undergraduates' social and academic involvement. We found that social Facebook use was positively linked to social involvement, particularly among non-shy students.…

People read for many different reasons. These goals affect the cognitive processes and strategies they use during reading. Understanding "how" reading goals exert their effects requires investigation of whether and how they affect specific component processes, such as validation. We investigated the effects of reading goal on text-based…

This work is based on previous studies showing that a short conversational intervention (SCI) focusing on the causes of the story events is effective in promoting the causal and mental content of children's narratives. In these studies, however, not all the children improved their narratives after the SCI). The present study examined individual…

This study aims to determine the attitudes of university students towards the use of social networks for educational purposes and to examine the differentiation of these attitudes by gender, type of education, department, grade point average, the most used social network and the time spent on social networks during the day. This study uses a…

Feeling inhibited and socially not at ease is reflected in the trait social inhibition (SI). SI is associated with psychopathology that arises in young adulthood, such as anxiety. We aim for a better insight into the genetic and environmental contributions to SI across the life span, and as such examine their contributions to SI stability and…

It is a fact that personal features and qualities play a crucial role in determining learners' success or failure in their attempt to learn foreign languages. It was these factors that lit a bulb in the mind and opened a path to set off to find out how these features affected the learners' communication eagerness in L2. The main aim of the current…