The purpose of this paper is to review and critique a groundbreaking research report. The research article under review in this paper is: "A Big Apple for Educators: New York City's Experiment with Schoolwide Performance Bonuses: Final Evaluation Report" (see ED521920). In 2007-08, a program called the Schoolwide Performance Bonus…

At many higher education institutions, admissions decisions often rely on standardized test scores and high school grades; yet, they are less reliable predictors for applicants falling slightly below cutoff points, what we call borderline applicants. Since borderline applicants are often from underrepresented backgrounds and diverted to 2-year…

As feedback is an important part of learning and motivation, we investigate how to adapt the feedback of a conversational agent to learner personality (as well as to learner performance, as we expect an interaction effect between personality and performance on feedback). We investigate two aspects of feedback. Firstly, we investigate whether the…

For over a decade, the National Science Foundation's Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program has funded researchers and educators to build an understanding of best practices, contexts, and processes contributing to K-12 students' motivation and participation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics…

As evidence-based reform becomes increasingly important in educational policy, it is becoming essential to understand how research design might contribute to reported effect sizes in experiments evaluating educational programs. The purpose of this study was to examine how methodological features such as types of publication, sample sizes, and…

One of the trump cards of digital educational games is their enormous intrinsic motivational potential. Although learning game design is often understood on a one-fitsall level, the actual motivational strength of an educational game strongly depends on the individual learners, their very specific goals, preferences, abilities, strength and…

This paper offers insight into learning Slovak in an e-learning environment. The need to reach distance-learners of Slovak led to the implementation of a web-based course on Slovak language and culture in 2008-2010. The pedagogical basis of the course, called Virtual Slovak, is the socioconstructivist approach to teaching and learning, in which…

Based on current theories of multimedia learning, we propose a strategy for learning from animations. Two different experimental studies were conducted in order to evaluate the strategy. In the first study, 22 sixth graders learned from an animation without the strategy while 21 students were encouraged to make use of the proposed strategy during…

If the purpose of language learning is communication, then improving students' reading comprehension competence becomes an overall goal in language teaching. This paper examines the online resources of reading comprehension tests with non-English major college students, and tackles the problem with the teaching method of integrating web-based…

This speech discusses the planning for and the implementation of the O.E.O. performance contracting experiments. The author argues that it was not performance contracting, but the O.E.O. experiment which failed. The author blames this failure not so much on the poor evaluation design, but rather on the number of interface problems which arose…

The first demonstration of the voucher concept took place at Alum Rock Union School District in San Jose, California. Describes the School District's first year experience with vouchers. (JF)

Article outlined some fundamental requirements that must be fulfilled by programmes of teacher education so that teachers can become facilitators of lifelong learning and reported on an experimental project that will test some of the hypotheses generated in this connection. (Author/RK)

Article described how students working towards a Bachelors degree in education volunteered to help relieve teachers of tasks that were not involved with instruction. (RK)

In an attempt to prevent drug abuse, the U.S. Army developed drug education programs (DEP) at all its installations to inform soldiers about the dynamics and consequences of drug use. This paper presents the findings of the recently completed evaluation of Army DEP. The study surveyed 1,716 enlisted men at 16 posts about exposure to the DEP and…

The purpose of this study was to describe the level of language maturity and the effect of a preschool language program on the language development of urban, Southern 4-year-olds. The 147 subjects (57 lower status blacks, 40 lower status whites, and 50 upper status whites) all participated in five-day per week prekindergarten programs. Dependent…