Illustration is always used as an example to make the written text or the utterance more clear in general. In Winarski's opinion (1997), one picture equals thousands of words. That is to say, illustrations are capable to express the meaning of unfamiliar language or a great deal of information in the reading material by vivid pictures, tables,…

Attending to practice has become a significant topic in science education today. As scientific argumentation is a typical form of scientific practice as well as an important educational practice, more and more attention has been paid to it by science education researchers. Evaluating students' competence in scientific argumentation is one of the…

Earlier research has shown that an excessive workload has a substantial negative effect on students' well being. The present study examines how Finnish and Chinese university students' perceptions of workload are related to their perceptions of the teaching and learning environments (TLE). This is done in order to determine whether the perceived…

Previous work on seductive details has demonstrated that interesting but irrelevant messages hinder students' text learning. Considering that there is little evidence suggesting the relationship between seductive details and prior knowledge, the present study examined how seductive details affect learning in terms of prior knowledge to address the…

The authors examined self-regulation of mathematics homework behavior (i.e., mathematics homework management). The participants consisted of 796 eighth-grade students (46 classes) in China. Multilevel results showed that mathematics homework management was positively associated with value belief at the class and individual level. At the individual…

Using computer keystroke logs, this study investigated how writing skill affected L2 writers' pausing patterns to gain insights into their management of the cognitive writing processes. The 59 participants, 29 in the more-skilled group and 30 in the less-skilled group, were recruited from a college English course at a key Chinese university. The…

The advance of computer input log and screen-recording programs over the last two decades has greatly facilitated research into the writing process in real time. Using Inputlog 4.0 and Camtasia 6.0 to record the writing process of 24 Chinese EFL writers in an argumentative task, this study explored L2 writers' pausing patterns in computer-assisted…

This study investigated Chinese secondary school English language teachers' grading decision making, focusing on the factors they considered and types of assessment they used for grading. A questionnaire was issued to 350 secondary school English language teachers in China. Descriptive analyses of the questionnaire data showed that these teachers…

This paper reported on a study of using blogs as out-of-class assignments for the development of learners' writing competence. There were 36 students of English majors from an intact second language (L2) writing class participating in this study. A mixed method design was employed to obtain both quantitative and qualitative data. The results…

This paper reports on a study designed to investigate (a) whether peer review is an effective pedagogical activity with adult Chinese students in the teaching of second language (L2) academic writing and (b) how factors such as perceptions of the influence of peer reviewers' L2 proficiency, previous experience with peer review, feedback…