This paper provides details on a classroom experiment that focuses on returns to foreign assets given uncertain future exchange rates. Students are assigned the role of foreign analysts and decide how much to invest abroad given their expectations about future exchange rates. The experiment allows students to practice calculating the returns to…

In this study, we present an educational design experiment seeking to promote interaction and knowledge sharing in groups and to establish a sense of community among students during a semester at Aalborg University, Denmark. The experiment is materialised as a tangible artefact in the form of a colourful box with materials and texts. Some of the…

This study explores kindergarten students' early notions of mathematical equivalence in the United States. In particular, it uses qualitative methods to examine the understandings children hold about the equal sign prior to formal instruction and how these understandings shift throughout an 8-week classroom teaching experiment designed to develop…

The purpose of this study is to explore how an introductory real analysis (IRA) course can be designed to bridge a gap between students' intuition and mathematical rigor. In particular, we focus on a task, called the e-strip activity, designed for the convergence of a sequence. Data were collected from a larger study conducted as a classroom…

This paper proposes "grounded feedback" as a way to provide implicit verification when students are working with a novel representation. In grounded feedback, students' responses are in the target, to-be-learned representation, and those responses are reflected in a more-accessible linked representation that is intrinsic to the domain.…

Given that a user interface interacts with users, a critical factor to be considered in improving the usability of an e-learning user interface is user-friendliness. Affordances enable users to more easily approach and engage in learning tasks because they strengthen positive, activating emotions. However, most studies on affordances limit…

The aim of the study was to develop the web-based teaching course for use in the process of Information and communication technology learning by the Tatar-speaking students. The first-year students of Higher School of Tatar Philology and Intercultural Communication of Kazan Federal University took part in the experiment. They were divided into two…

Casual games are everywhere. People play them throughout life to pass the time, to engage in social interactions, and to learn. However, their simplicity and use in distraction-heavy environments can attenuate their potential for learning. This experimental study explored the effects playing an online, casual game has on awareness of human…

Quek, Tay, Toh, Leong, and Dindyal (2011) proposed that a design-theory-practice troika should always be considered for a designed package to be acceptable to the research users who, in this case, are teachers and schools. This paper describes the fine-tuning to the MProSE problem-solving design made by the teachers in the school after first round…

Online learning from video modeling examples, in which a human model demonstrates and explains how to perform a learning task, is an effective instructional method that is increasingly used nowadays. However, model characteristics such as gender tend to differ across videos, and the model-observer similarity hypothesis suggests that such…

The objective of this research and development was to develop a curriculum for enhancing grade 7 students' aesthetic sense and substantial art learning. There were 2 phases of the study consisting of: (i) the study of basic information about art aesthetics, including the attributes, approaches, theories, problems, and needs, (ii) the development…

The present study tested the "interference hypothesis"-that learning and using more advanced representations and strategies requires the inhibition of prior, less advanced ones. Specifically, it examined the relation between inhibitory control and number line estimation performance. Experiment 1 compared the accuracy of adults' (N = 53)…

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…

In a series of two "in vivo" experiments, we examine whether correct and incorrect examples with prompts for self-explanation can be effective for improving students' conceptual understanding and procedural skill in Algebra when combined with guided practice. In Experiment 1, students working with the Algebra I Cognitive Tutor were randomly…

The goal of the present study was to examine the mechanisms underlying a strategy that we developed to make instructional explanations effective. In two experiments participants learned about plate tectonics from a multimedia material, including adjunct explanations that revised common misunderstandings. These explanations were either marked…