Rote memory (RM) has become the primary method of learning vocabulary for decades in China. However, RM is tedious, leading to reduced motivation and concentration. In contrast, Educational Video Games (EVGs) are attractive and fun, which could be an alternative to RM. Although most studies have investigated EVGs' effectiveness, empirical research…

In our current culture, children are exposed to a huge amount of audiovisual media, of which many formats include animated pictures, such as in videos, for instance. The current study addresses the use of audiovisual media in order to increase the effectiveness of learning and teaching. We examined how auditory text, audiovisual text with static…

Text comprehension requires readers to mentally simulate the described situation by reactivating previously acquired sensory and motor information from (episodic) memory. Drawing upon research demonstrating gender differences, favouring girls, in tasks involving episodic memory retrieval, the present study explores whether gender differences exist…

The amount of information that students can successfully learn and recall at least 1 day later is called an acquisition rate (AR) and is unique to the individual student. The current study extended previous drill rehearsal research with word recognition by (a) using students identified with a learning disability in reading, (b) assessing set sizes…

This study investigated how middle school students leverage information about bound Latin roots (e.g., "voc" in "advocate" and "vociferous") to infer meanings of unfamiliar words, and how instruction may facilitate morphological analysis using roots. A dynamic assessment of morphological analysis was administered to…

This study investigated how middle school students leverage information about bound Latin roots (e.g., voc in "advocate" and "vociferous") to infer meanings of unfamiliar words, and how instruction may facilitate morphological analysis using roots. A dynamic assessment of morphological analysis was administered to 29 sixth…

High opportunities to respond (OTR) have been touted as being a key factor in a popular and effective drill procedure called incremental rehearsal (IR). However, IR has also been criticized because it takes more instructional time than other drill procedures and can be less time efficient. The current study compared the effectiveness and…

This study investigated the differential contribution of auditory-verbal and visuospatial working memory (WM) on decoding skills in second- and fifth-grade children identified with poor decoding. Thirty-two second-grade students and 22 fifth-grade students completed measures that assessed simple and complex auditory-verbal and visuospatial memory,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate verbal working memory processing both before and after providing semantically elaborated training sentences designed to enhance memory for symbol-word (visual-verbal) pairs. Abilities of 20 children diagnosed with Reading Disorder (RD) and 20 age-matched peers who were normally achieving in reading (NA)…