While many view learning as a process of reducing learners' uncertainty, research suggests that instruction that is uncertain can promote learning and transfer better than instruction that is certain. In addition, research on curiosity suggests that uncertainty is a key trigger of curiosity, which in turn can facilitate learning. However,…

Researchers have investigated the demography and styles of engagement of those who enroll in MOOCs but have lent little attention to how learners navigate MOOCs' ambiguity as academic certifications. Analyzing semi-structured interviews with 60 people who devoted substantial time to at least one MOOC between 2014-2017, we find that people use…

The purpose of this article is to reflect on the pertinence and utility of using a trauma-informed lens in educational development. A trauma-informed approach is a framework grounded in an understanding of and responsiveness to the impact of trauma. After I describe the primary source of traumatic stress many faculty members are experiencing, I…

Classical automated test assembly (ATA) methods assume fixed and known coefficients for the constraints and the objective function. This hypothesis is not true for the estimates of item response theory parameters, which are crucial elements in test assembly classical models. To account for uncertainty in ATA, we propose a chance-constrained…

Color has been considered as a special problem in several disciplines, notably art and music, but also philosophy and literature. Given that color is also a central feature of some scientific thought (think of Newton and the color spectrum, for example), the question "What color is the interdisciplinary?" seems to be a golden opportunity…

The interest in educational and professional aspirations of students transiting to post-secondary education has gained prominence in academic debates and policy agendas internationally. Political interventions for raising aspirations quite often draw on narrow instrumental and rationalistic assumptions of individual decision-making that, as we…

Increasingly, competing discourses shape tensions between the role of the contemporary university and the global markets in which universities must exist. This paper draws on the examination of interviews with nine education academics in Australia to illuminate the construction of 'global' in the production of the global graduate (GG). Discourse…

This qualitative study explores school principals' perceptions and enactments of shared sense-making processes during a generally-outlined pedagogical reform, i.e. "a broad-policy reform allowing educators to exercise their discretion in meeting its pedagogical goals," aiming to inquire what makes such processes critical to schools'…

Learning to take safe and effective action in complex settings rife with uncertainty is essential for patient safety and quality care. Doing so is not easy for trainees, as they often consider certainty to be a necessary precursor for action and subsequently struggle in these settings. Understanding how skillful clinicians work comfortably when…

This article explores the illusory transparency phenomenon in childhood and tests two accounts of the phenomenon: the construal and the naïve (pragmatic) accounts. One hundred nine children between 8 and 13 years old participated in an adapted task of illusory transparency. Children read a story in which a character wrote an ambiguous message to…

People learn when they have to learn. This quite simple but antiquated insight of motivational psychology can be interpreted in various ways. First of all, it can be understood in a very traditional way as an argument for authoritarian class-management and educational control through external incentives like grades, shame and punishments. On the…

This conceptual paper explored the fundamental barriers to successful equity training and professional development for teachers. This was done to show the need for a professional development series, based on Ting-Toomey and Chung's (2012) cultural value pattern analysis. Using the theoretical lens of post-colonial theory, the authors posit the…

Recently, a debate has arisen around what can be called the "indistinguishability thesis," that is, the claim that it is impossible to distinguish between qualitative and quantitative research. In contrast, this article argues that the inability to define simple, sharp boundaries around qualitative and quantitative research does not…

Purpose: Listeners understand significantly more speech in noise when the talker's face can be seen (visual speech) in comparison to an auditory-only baseline (a visual speech benefit). This study investigated whether the visual speech benefit is reduced when the correspondence between auditory and visual speech is uncertain and whether any…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the social and cognitive underpinnings of miscommunication during an interactive listening task. Method: An eye and computer mouse-tracking visual-world paradigm was used to investigate how a listener's cognitive effort (local and global) and decision-making processes were affected by a…