In this article, the authors discuss how art educators often find themselves faced with students whose needs are beyond what the art educators feel trained to handle. How can they design lessons so that every student feels successful? Because art educators are also art therapists, school colleagues often ask them for help in working with students…

When learning basic color vocabulary, young children show a selective delay in the acquisition of brown and gray relative to other basic color terms. In this study, we first establish the robustness of this finding and then investigate the extent to which perception, language, and color preference may influence color conceptualization.…

Background: Tourette's syndrome (TS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with fronto-striatal dysfunction. There is debate as to the extent to which TS is associated with cognitive impairment. Some authors argue that any impairments seen are attributable to comorbid psychiatric symptomatology, whilst others have suggested that…

This chapter is concerned with how assessments of students' work in classrooms, although primarily intended to promote learning, can also become an important source of information for evaluating a school's effectiveness within an accountability system. The authors begin their discussion by considering issues of fairness, to schools and to their…

The aim of this study was to evaluate the role of short-term memory and attention in time estimation. For this purpose we studied prospective time verbal estimation in 21 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), and compared their performance with that of 21 matched normal controls in two different conditions: during a digit span task and during an…

The effect of second language experience and vocabulary ability was investigated in a semantic priming experiment with weakly related English word pairs (e.g., "city"-"grass"). Participants made lexical decisions to targets preceded by unrelated or weakly related primes or to nonword targets preceded by words. Reliable priming was found for…

In this study we investigate a strategy for engaging high school mathematics teachers in an "initial" examination of their teaching in a way that is nonthreatening and at the same time effectively supports the development of teachers' pedagogical content knowledge [Shulman (1986). "Educational Researcher," 15(2), 4-14]. Based on the work…

Using cognitive load theory and cognitive theory of multimedia learning as a framework, we conducted two within-subject experiments with 10 participants each in order to investigate (1) if the audiovisual presentation of verbal and pictorial learning materials would lead to a higher demand on phonological cognitive capacities than the visual-only…

Development in the ability of 11-year-olds to solve numerical problems of addition, multiplication, and proportion was analysed by means of three Rasch models of change. The students, who had participated in a New Zealand numeracy project in 2002, comprised two groups that differed in socio-economic status: 1,274 students came from low…

Eight experiments investigated the effects of visual, spatial, auditory, and executive interference on the symbolic comparison of animal size and ferocity, semantic goodness of words, and numbers. Dynamic visual noise (DVN) and the reading of visually presented stimulus items were shown to selectively interfere with response times on the animal…

This article introduces an approach to planning sequences of communication tasks that require learners to become personally involved in their learning. By drawing on their own ideas and experiences, as a product of earlier tasks in a given sequence, learners generate the content and resource material on which subsequent tasks operate. The article…

Information storage in the brain is a temporally graded process involving different memory phases as well as different structures in the mammalian brain. Cortical plasticity seems to be essential to store stable long-term memories, although little information is available at the moment regarding molecular and cellular events supporting memory…

We examine the visual processing of high-functioning adults with developmental dyslexia (mean Performance IQ=126.5) and current phonological problems. In comparison to an age- and IQ-matched control group, the group with dyslexia showed deficits in two tasks associated with magnocellular/dorsal pathway function. For the "frequency doubling"…

We investigated the role of executive and spatial representational processes in impaired performance of block construction tasks by children with Williams syndrome (WS), a rare genetic defect that results in severely impaired spatial cognition. In Experiment 1, we examined performance in two kinds of block construction tasks, Simple Puzzles, in…

In this article, we explore how students' agency relates to both highly structured and open-ended learning environments. This is done by analysing how students' understanding of tasks evolves through their activities in relation to the representations inscribed in two technology-rich learning environments. Based on the sociocultural approach to…