In educational environments, monitoring persons' progress over time may help teachers to evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching procedures. Electronic learning environments are increasingly being used as part of formal education and resulting datasets can be used to understand and to improve the environment. This study presents…

This study investigated changes in elementary school students' (n = 140) situational interest as a function of achievement goal orientation profiles and task characteristics. The authors repeatedly measured situational interest during a simulated science learning task in 2 task conditions that differed in the concreteness of the task…

The authors tested whether students can be taught to better understand conventional representations in diagrams, photographs, and other visual representations in science textbooks. The authors developed a teacher-delivered, workbook-and-discussion-based classroom instructional method called Conventions of Diagrams (COD). The authors trained 1…

In 3 experiments, undergraduates used their own best method (control) or an "imposed" face-name mnemonic strategy to associate 18 caricatured faces, names, and additional facts. On all immediate tests (prompted by the faces), and on the delayed tests of Experiments 2a and 2b combined, mnemonic students statistically outperformed control students…

The authors examined how the grading scheme affects learning and students' reactions to the Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique (IFAT), an answer form providing immediate feedback on multiple-choice questions. Undergraduate students (N = 141) took a general-knowledge multiple-choice test of low, medium, or high difficulty. They used the IFAT…

The authors investigated the comparative effect of the learning cycle and expository instruction on 8th-grade students' achievement in genetics. They adopted the nonequivalent control group design as a type of quasiexperimental design. The experimental group (N = 104) received learning cycle instruction, and the control group (N = 109) received…

Students are often faced with the temptation of attractive activities, which may interfere with the learning task and result in detrimental effects on experience and performance. Seventy-seven students (50 girls, 27 boys; M age = 15.9 years; SD = 1.65 years) participated in an experiment that reflected the typical situation of students having to…

The author explored the potential to promote students' understanding of difficult science concepts through an examination of the inter-relationships among the teachers' instructional approach, students' learning preference styles, and their levels of learning process. The concept "air pressure," which requires an understanding of invisible,…

The extant picture-learning research does not address confusing word pairs that are not concrete (e.g., in and into). In this study, university students viewed 11 timed Web pages containing information on confusing word pairs. Each page addressed one word pair and distinguished the words with examples (example group), examples and rules (rule…

The role common region (CR) plays in acquiring scientific information from node-link displays was studied by testing 88 subjects under conditions of knowledge maps demonstrating or not demonstrating CR. Field-dependent subjects scored better than the field-independent subjects for maps demonstrating CR, whereas the opposite was true for maps not…

Attempts to evaluate the effect of various combinations of traditional instructional methods (TM) and personalized instruction (PSI) on final exam scores. It is hypothesized that groups which received PSI combined with enrichment provided by TM will score significantly higher on their cumulative final exam than students who receive instruction by…

The degree of relationship among measures of learning proficiency, cognitive development (following Piaget), school achievement in reading, mathematics, and spelling, and IQ among 79 low socioeconomic status black males attending the seventh grade in an inner-city school was examined. (Editor)

Sixty kindergarten, sixty second grade, and sixty fourth grade students performed several memory tasks under one of six conditions. The conditions differed as to the method of presentation of information. The study focused on developmental changes in children's use of verbal, nonverbal, and spatial-positional cues for memory. (Editor)

The primary purpose of this research was to investigate the short- and long-term retention effects resulting from training students to organize and to classify information to be acquired. (Author)

A refinement of Hofmann's paradigm for conservation training is proposed. It is suggested that a delayed learning task be utilized for assessing generalization. This, it is argued, would be also be a more preferable measure of whether or not new cognitive structures have been acquired. (Editor)