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…

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…

This project was designed to compare three preschool curricula, with staff model and program operation held constant. The curricula were (1) a unit-based curriculum emphasizing the social-emotional development goals of the traditional nursery school, (2) a cognitively-oriented curriculum developed by the Ypsilanti Perry Preschool Project, and (3)…

An experimental Basic Electricity and Electronics course (BE/E) utilizing a lock-step, instructor presentation methodology was developed and evaluated at the Service School Command, Great Lakes. The study, directed toward the training of lower mental group, school nonqualified personnel, investigated comparative data on test performance, attitude,…

The paper describes the efforts made in a Portland, Oregon suburban school district to develop effective supplementary career awareness instruction for fifth grade students. Evaluation of a three-year exemplary integrated K-14 vocational education project (VIGOR) had revealed no significant differences in career awareness competencies between…

An evaluation of materials in the sequential anthropology curriculum project with regard to student learning and teacher training is presented. The project sample consisted of 2,183 students in grades 1, 2, 4, and 5. Two forms of the anthropology achievement test were administered as pretest and posttest measures to experimental and control groups…

The report describes an 18-month research project at Chanute Air Force Base, Illinois, designed to evaluate the effectiveness of inceptive motivation techniques in Air Force technical training. The first phase of the research identified incentives. The findings were used in the second phase of the research which made these incentives contingent on…

This study investigates which teaching style-Chinese bilingual or English as a second language--leads to greater oral English maturity and how useful the Chinese language is in helping a non-English-speaking Chinese person learn oral English. In the English-as-a-second-language method, the student's native language is used sparingly to avoid…

The authors conducted an experiment during the 2003-2004 school year to determine whether "On Our Way to English" ("OWE"), a product to help elementary students learn to read and speak English, was more effective in a California and a Texas school district than materials already in place. In the California study, 384 English…

The authors were asked to find out whether "On Our Way to English" ("OWE"), a supplementary, text-based product to help elementary school students learn to read and speak English was more effective in a California and a Texas school district than the materials the districts already had in place. They conducted an experiment…