The fading of instructional scripts can be regarded as necessary for allowing learners to take over control of their cognitive activities during the acquisition of skills such as argumentation. There is, however, the danger that learners might relapse into novice strategies after script prompts are faded. One possible solution could be monitoring…

Two complementary studies, one in the laboratory and one in the field, compared the usage patterns and the effectiveness of interactive videos and illustrated textbooks when German secondary school students learned complex content. For this purpose, two videos affording different degrees of interactivity and a content-equivalent illustrated…

We confronted 151, 5th and 6th elementary grade pupils with a quantitative problem in a mathematics or religion class, to examine the influence of the context on pupils' understanding and solution of such problems inside and outside the mathematics class. Pupils were first asked to solve a problem about fair sharing either during a mathematics or…

This study examined the relationships among Taiwanese high school students' scientific epistemic beliefs, conceptions of learning science, and self-efficacy of learning science. The questionnaire responses gathered from 377 high school students in Taiwan were utilized to elicit such relationships. The analysis of the structural equation model…

The educational advantages of inquiry learning environments that incorporate modelling facilities are often challenged by students' poor inquiry skills. This study examined two types of model progression as means to compensate for these skill deficiencies. Model order progression (MOP), the predicted optimal variant, gradually increases the…

This study tested the effects of two instructional aids in a complex, dynamic environment, specifically, a business simulation. Participants studied (1) a "causal map," which depicted key variables in an interconnected network, (2) a textual outline of the same relationships, or (3) no-aid. With the relevant aid still available, the participants…

This study examines the manner in which learners' justifications for arguments are supported during collaborative task-solving in a virtual learning setting. In particular, it investigates the effects of a collaboration script and a content scheme on the learners' ability to provide adequate justifications for arguments pertaining to collaborative…

The time course of learners' processing of a complex animation was studied using a dynamic diagram of a piano mechanism. Over successive repetitions of the material, two forms of cueing (standard colour cueing and anti-cueing) were administered either before or during the animated segment of the presentation. An uncued group and two other control…

Support for children with special educational needs in inclusive classrooms is increasingly provided by teaching assistants (TAs). They often have a direct pedagogical role, taking responsibility for instruction in mathematics. The quality of TAs' oral skills is crucial for learning but has rarely been researched. Using conversation analysis, this…

This longitudinal study investigated the cross-lagged associations between children's academic skill development, task-avoidant behaviour in the context of homework, and parental beliefs about their child's success from kindergarten to Grade 2. The participants were 1267 children. The children's pre-skills were assessed at the end of the…

It is widely documented that the density property of rational numbers is challenging for students. The framework theory approach to conceptual change places this observation in the more general frame of problems faced by learners in the transition from natural to rational numbers. As students enrich, but do not restructure, their natural number…

The present study investigated whether the classroom social climate varies between lessons. Specifically, the within- and across-lesson associations of coercive and supportive teacher behaviour incidents with the classroom social climate were studied. Participants in the study were 48 Dutch secondary school teachers and their classes, that is,…

This study investigated students' activating positive affective experiences in mathematics lessons, their antecedents, their cognitive and motivational consequences, as well as their effect on achievement. The participants were 682 Grade 8 and 9 students from 37 classes from Germany and Switzerland who participated in a video study of lessons on…

The advent of networked environments into the classroom is changing classroom debates in many ways. This article addresses one key attribute of these environments, namely anonymity, to explore its consequences for co-present adolescents anonymous, by virtue of the computer system, to peers not to teachers. Three studies with 16-17 year-olds used a…

This study investigated the flow of interest in a reading-to-write activity. It was hypothesized that (a) different contents in a text would stimulate different types of interest and (b) different writing tasks would impact differently students' use of interesting text segments. Participants were 247 11th- and 12th-grade students, who were divided…