In a glance, the visual system can provide a summary of some kinds of information about objects in a scene. We explore how summary information about "orientation" is extracted and find that some representations of orientation are privileged over others. Participants judged the average orientation of either a set of 6 bars or 6 circular…

The article is devoted to the question of improvement of quality and efficiency of professional training of future technicians in aviation industry in the American educational establishments. Main attention is paid to the studies of pedagogical technologies, which are used for the sake of qualitative and efficient training of specialists of…

Because it employs an emergent-learning framework, equivalence-based instruction (EBI) is said to be highly efficient, but its presumed benefits must be compared quantitatively with alternative techniques. In a randomized controlled trial, 61 college students attempted to learn 32 pairs of proprietary and generic drug names using computer-based…

Among the major trends in the higher education (HE) sector, the development of rankings as a policy and managerial tool is of particular relevance. However, despite the diffusion of these instruments, it is still not clear how they relate with traditional performance measures, like unit costs and efficiency scores. In this paper, we estimate a…

The goal of this study is to identify new dimensions of language attitudes to allow for both their multidimensionality and possible language-specificity stemming from local sociolinguistic environments. Adopting a two-step methodology comprising (1) elicitation of adjectives in group interviews and (2) employment of the semantic differential…

Different studies have showed poor reading performance in the deaf compared to the hearing population. This has overshadowed the fact that a minority of deaf children learns to read successfully and reaches levels similar to their hearing peers. We analyze whether deaf people deploy the same cognitive and learning processes in reading as their…

Nowadays, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have raised great expectations due to their potential for changing the relationship between students and professors, academy and the general community. To conceptualize, the terms "course", "online", "massive" and "open" have been redefined and reinvented so many…

Repeated readings (RR) is an evidence-based instructional technique in which students read the same text multiple times. Currently, little is known about how effects of RR may differ based on students' achievement levels. Eye tracking provides a means for closely examining instructional effects because it permits measurement of subtle changes that…

Item response theory (IRT) has gained an increasing popularity in large-scale educational and psychological testing situations because of its theoretical advantages over classical test theory. Unidimensional graded response models (GRMs) are useful when polytomous response items are designed to measure a unified latent trait. They are limited in…

The general consensus in the field is that when the home language is different from the language of instruction in school then children's literacy attainments could slow down. In this 26-year review of the literature on children's literacy attainments in low- to middle-income countries, 40 correlational, ethnographic and intervention studies…

Decreasing government funding and regulated tuition policies have created a financially constrained environment for Canada's universities. The conventional response to such conditions is to cut programme offerings and services in an attempt to lower costs throughout the institution. However, we argue that three Canadian universities have reacted…

Students' satisfaction with their university and course is of fundamental importance to retain students and promote their positive worth-of-mouth. The objective of this research is to analyse the level of efficiency of Portuguese public universities, according to the expectations and satisfaction of their students. To accomplish the objective,…

Self-monitoring is regarded throughout the literature as an effective classroom intervention. Researchers have used self-monitoring interventions to improve school-related behavior of students with varying disabilities across a variety of settings. Although research supports the use of self-monitoring, traditional self-monitoring techniques may be…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to suggest a methodology to calculate efficiency scores for a sample of Italian primary and middle schools. The main aim is to relate these measures of efficiency to a set of "external" factors that can affect schools' performance, such as the average socio-economic background of their students,…

We investigate the relative merits of unconditional cash transfers (UCT), conditional cash transfers (CCT), and the effects of improvements in education quality on efficiency and welfare. In our setting, some parents underinvest in their children's education because capital market imperfections prevent them from borrowing. Under sufficiently…