One of the key trends in learning technology in recent years has been the growing interest in simulations and serious games. Much of the research into simulations and serious games has tended to focus on aspects of fun and engagement rather than on what is happening in the process to cause transferable learning. Much of it has been based on small…

The motivation for this paper is the authors' recent work on several randomized control trials in which they found the primary result, which averaged across subgroups or sites, to be moderated by demographic or site characteristics. They are led to examine a distinction that the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) makes between "confirmatory"…

This study aimed to assess the effect of musical training in statistical learning of tone sequences using Magnetoencephalography (MEG). Specifically, MEG recordings were used to investigate the neural and functional correlates of the pre-attentive ability for detection of deviance, from a statistically learned tone sequence. The effect of…

Increased intraindividual variability in response time (RTSD) has been observed reliably in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and has often been used as a measure of inattention. RTSD is assumed to reflect attentional lapses and distractibility, though evidence for the validity of this connection is lacking. We assessed whether RTSD…

Background: Empathy is an individual's capacity to understand the behavior of others, to experience their feelings, and to express that understanding to them. Empathic ability is an asset professionally for individuals, such as teachers, physicians and social workers, who work with people. Being empathetic is also critical to our being able to…

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a disease with a wide-ranging impact on functional status. The aim of the study was to examine the added value of simultaneously evaluating fatigue, personal ADL and handwriting performance as indicators for functional decline among patients with MS. Participants were 50 outpatients with MS and 26 matched healthy…

Randomized trials have experienced a marked surge in endorsement and popularity in education research in the past decade. This surge reignited paradigm debates and spurred qualitative critics to accuse these experimental designs of eclipsing qualitative research. This article reviews a current iteration of this debate and examines two randomized…

The author's plenary address at the 3rd International Association for the Scientific Study of Intellectual Disabilities-Europe Conference in Rome, Italy (October 2010), provided a retrospective overview of a longitudinal study conducted with a cohort of pre-teens (11 and 13 years of age) residing in Warsaw, Poland, in the 1970s. The intent was to…

This study evaluates the impact of an independent postmidterm question analysis exercise on the ability of students to answer subsequent exam questions on the same topics. It was conducted in three sections (~400 students/section) of introductory biology. Graded midterms were returned electronically, and each student was assigned a subset of…

The use of growth-modeling analysis (GMA)--including hierarchical linear models, latent growth models, and general estimating equations--to evaluate interventions in psychology, psychiatry, and prevention science has grown rapidly over the last decade. However, an effect size associated with the difference between the trajectories of the…

This study aims to develop and apply a rubric to evaluate the solutions of pre-service primary science teachers to questions about Newton's Laws of Motion. Two groups were taught the topic using the same teaching methods and administered four questions before and after teaching. Furthermore, 76 students in the experiment group were instructed…

Program providers work extremely hard to offer services that they believe will enhance the lives and future prospects of children and youth. But how can they be sure that their program is having the intended impacts? How can funders and policy makers be sure that their investments in programs are paying off in substantially better outcomes for…

Purpose: This article describes the development of a measure, called First Mentions (FM), that can be used to evaluate the referring expressions that children use to introduce characters and objects when telling a story. Method: Participants were 377 children ages 4 to 9 years (300 with typical development, 77 with language impairment) who told…

Improving reading rate can be difficult for poor readers. In this experiment, we investigated the impact of improvement in reading rate on other aspects of reading, including word recognition, decoding, vocabulary, and comprehension. Poor readers in Grades 2 or 4 (N = 123) were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions: practice reading text at their…

A three-month study examined how interactive iconography impacts social studies and promotes critical writing skills. Groups of three middle-school immigrant students constructed museum labels using "Scope Out", an experimental online revision tool that makes iconography interactive. This study included three comparison groups and one…