In the past decade, virtual worlds have progressed from isolated sectors of the Internet, inhabited by computer and fantasy role-playing enthusiasts, to one of the fastest growing sectors in the gaming industry. In the process, they have established themselves as promising venues for the delivery of online instruction. Unfortunately, during that…

The aim of this study is to scrutinize the characteristics of conceptual meaning making when students engage with virtual worlds in combination with a spreadsheet with the aim to develop graphs. We study how these tools and the representations they contain or enable students to construct serve to influence their understanding of energy resource…

A Harvard Business School-style teaching case can be a powerful pedagogical tool to teach law and ethics to business students because instructors can combine a traditional business case study with Socratic-style dialogue and legal analysis from a managerial perspective. This teaching note includes suggestions for several methods of using the case,…

This article reviews the (quasi)experimental research of the past decade on the learning effects of computer simulations in science education. The focus is on two questions: how use of computer simulations can enhance traditional education, and how computer simulations are best used in order to improve learning processes and outcomes. We report on…

Technology has the potential to improve education but only if it is applied with purpose and consideration of the audience. Understanding technology's role in education goes beyond the comparison of tools; there is a need to better understand student acceptance of technology so appropriate educational scaffolding and support can be provided. The…

Geospatial skills are critical to effective geologic mapping, and many geoscience students experience challenges in developing good geologic interpretation and projection skills. A physical (non-virtual) underground mine mapping simulation in a building on the Adams State College campus in Alamosa, Colorado, provides an excellent cost-effective…

Team leaders are expected to adequately analyse team conflicts. Both content and analytical depth of cognitive processes determine team leaders' performance and are assumed to differ with level of expertise. A study is reported in which team leaders at four different levels of expertise (novices, semi-experts, experts, mediators) were compared in…

A lot of people risk money with bets on sport events or other events. Bookkeepers that offer such bets earn a lot of money. We are making a proposal (more exactly: a concept for a part of a basic mathematics course) for learning mathematics behind the screen (internet bets are very popular). Learners should organize a "sports event"…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of using an audit simulation product in a classroom setting. Many students and professionals feel that a disconnect exists between learning auditing in the classroom and practicing auditing in the workplace. It was hoped that the introduction of an audit simulation tool would help to…

To support the work of Tennessee's Energy Efficient Schools Initiative (EESI) Council, this report describes data on energy expenditures in school districts for 2002/03-2007/08. Energy expenditures rose from about 2.6 percent to about 3.0 percent of total expenditures over the period, with some differences in the mix of energy types and…

Goldberg's (1995) recognition that, in addition to various word-level constructions, sentences also instantiate meaningful argument structure constructions enables a non-polysemy-based analysis of various verb 'alternations' (Levin 1993). In such an analysis, meaning variations associated with the use of the same verb in different argument…

The concept of arguing aspects of legal scenarios in order to facilitate student learning within the law curriculum originated in the vocational Inns of Court in fourteenth-century England. Nowadays, simulations of court proceedings, such as moot courts and mock trials, are widely employed as educational tools in law modules in third-level…

In spite of the growing interest in cross-cultural research and assessment, there is little research on statistical procedures that can be used to simultaneously assess the differential item functioning (DIF) across multiple groups. The chief objective of this work is to show a unified framework for the analysis of DIF in multiple groups using one…

Application of Bayesian item selection criteria in computerized adaptive testing might result in improvement of bias and MSE of the ability estimates. The question remains how to apply Bayesian item selection criteria in the context of constrained adaptive testing, where large numbers of specifications have to be taken into account in the item…

Crawford and Howell (1998) have pointed out that the common practice of z-score inference on cognitive disability is inappropriate if a patient's performance on a task is compared with relatively few typical control individuals. Appropriate univariate and multivariate statistical tests have been proposed for these studies, but these are only valid…