Empirical arguments rely on examples without necessarily addressing all cases. Students should be skeptical of empirical evidence and should seek more secure arguments for generalizations, such as those that explain why a generalization is true for all cases. Generalizing on the basis of patterns in data is an important mathematical practice;…

A central goal of the learning sciences is to discover principles that determine the optimal amount of instructional assistance to support robust learning (Koedinger & Aleven, 2007). We examined learning outcomes from providing and withholding stepwise instructional explanations as students studied worked examples and solved physics problems. We…

Assigning difficulty level indicators to the knowledge units helps the learners plan their learning activities more efficiently. This paper focuses on how to use the topology of a knowledge map to compute and rank the difficulty levels of knowledge units. Firstly, the authors present the hierarchical structure and properties of the knowledge map.…

University education often suffers from a lack of an explicit and adaptable didactic design. Students complain about the insufficient adaptability to the learners' needs. Learning content and services need to reach their audience according to their different prerequisites, needs, and different learning styles and conditions. A way to overcome such…

Virtual worlds have been linked with e-learning applications to create virtual learning environments (VLEs) for the past decade. However, while they can support many educational activities that extend both traditional on-campus teaching and distance learning, they are used primarily for learning content generated and managed by instructors. With…

The potential impact of implicit learning on education has been repeatedly stressed, though little research has examined this connection directly. The current paper describes two experiments that, inspired by artificial grammar learning experiments, examine the utility of implicit learning as a method for teaching atomic bonding rules to 11-12…

Recent discoveries about the whole brain seem to call for a holistic approach to learning, one in which educators would teach the whole person, including physical and emotional states as well as cognitive abilities. Three holistic techniques are particularly relevant to education: (1) biofeedback; (2) yoga; and (3) the Lozanov method. Biofeedback…

Southwest Regional Laboratory IDCMS (Instructional Development Control and Monitoring System) will be a flexible hardware system for controlling and monitoring instruction and research in the laboratory setting. This paper seeks to introduce potential users to the system and software designers to representative challenges that system exploitation…