Lyle F. Bachman is Professor, Department of Applied Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles. He is a past president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics and of the International Language Testing Association. He has published numerous articles and books in the areas of language testing, program evaluation, and second…

Learning the Chinese tone system is a major challenge to students of Chinese as a second or foreign language. Part of the problem is that the spoken Chinese syllable presents a complex perceptual input that overlaps tone with segments. This complexity can be addressed through directing attention to the critical features of a component (tone in…

In its mathematics standards, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) states that problem solving is an integral part of all mathematics learning and exposure to problem solving strategies should be embedded across the curriculum. Furthermore, by high school, students should be able to use, decide and invent a wide range of strategies.…

The "WVEB" Mathematics Project is a collaborative program offering college-level courses to high school students. Results of a matched-pair study comparing on- and off-campus students in algebra indicate that both sections show a significant gain in score on the math "ACT" test, with no difference in gain found between…

Successful performance improvement efforts are closely tied to the strength and integrity of the performance analysis process. During a time when higher education institutions are facing increasing budget cuts, the ability to recruit and retain students is extremely important. For some institutions, web-based courses have been viewed as a way to…

Despite concerted efforts by science educators to understand patterns of evolutionary reasoning in science students and teachers, the vast majority of evolution education studies have failed to carefully consider or control for item feature effects in knowledge measurement. Our study explores whether robust contextualization patterns emerge within…

Roughly one-fifth of the US population displays one or more symptoms of dyslexia: a specific learning disability that affects an individual's ability to process written language. Consequently, elementary school teachers are teaching students who struggle with inaccurate or slow reading, poor spelling, poor writing, and other language processing…

Previous research has found a link between theory of mind and cooperation. The aim of this study is to deepen into this relationship, to identify which theory of mind skills are more related to the cooperative ability on a referential communication task. A total of 50 children from first and fifth grade completed a battery of theory of mind tasks,…

This study examined motivational strategies and utilisation of Internet resources as determinants of research productivity of lecturers in universities of agriculture in Nigeria. One thousand, one hundred and thirty two (1,132) copies of the questionnaire were administered on the lecturers in universities of agriculture in Nigeria. Eight hundred…

In an effort to standardize academic risk assessment, the NCAA developed the graduation risk overview (GRO) model. Although this model was designed to assess graduation risk, its ability to predict grade-point average (GPA) remained unknown. Therefore, 134 individual risk assessments were made to determine GRO model effectiveness in the…

This study aimed to evaluate a training programme for Dutch teachers in six institutes for nursing education to support students' reflection skills. The research question was: what are the feasibility, quality and effects of the programme? The training programme focused on four competences of teachers regarding instructing, guiding, giving…

As education policy in the U.S. focuses increasingly on the quality of classroom instruction, there is a growing need to identify valid constructs and develop reliable tools that measure student opportunities to learn academic knowledge and skills. The purpose of this study is to examine the relative contributions of two different classroom…

The ultimate purpose of school lies in the success and achievement of its students. Therefore, efforts must be made to continuously improve achievement for every student. What the teacher knows and can do in the classroom is the most powerful factor in increasing a student's achievement (Cunningham & Allington, 2003; Darling-Hammond, 2000;…

Three domains have to be developed for making a perfect man. Affective domain is indispensable for protecting the aged parents, encouraging the moral values and changing the positive attitude of the learners. All the parents, policy makers and academicians expect to develop the cognitive domain of the learners but they fail to improve the domains…

This paper presents a computer based diagnostic tool developed to facilitate the learning process. The developed tool is capable of generating possible error syndromes associated with the answers received. The developed tool simulates the error pattern of the test results and then accordingly models the action plan to help in children's learning…