This study examines strategies (inferencing and ignoring) and knowledge sources (semantics, morphology, paralinguistics, etc.) that second language learners of English use to process unfamiliar words in listening comprehension and whether the use of strategies or knowledge sources relates to successful text comprehension or word comprehension. Data were collected using the procedures of immediate retrospection without recall support and of stimulated recall. Twenty participants with Chinese as...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Listening Comprehension, Paralinguistics, Semantics, Learning Strategies, Inferences,...
The purpose of this research is to examine the effect of integrating the digital media such as mobile and CAD technology on designing process of Malaysian polytechnic architecture students in producing a creative product. A website is developed based on Caroll's minimal theory, while mobile and CAD technology integration is based on Brown and Campione's learning with technology theory. This study utilized a quasi-experimental method. Final semester students of four (4) polytechnics are chosen...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Architecture, Computer Assisted Instruction, Technology Integration, Correlation,...
In this study, we are interested to see the impact of self-discipline on students' knowledge and learning. Self-discipline can influence both learning rate as well as knowledge accumulation over time. We used a Knowledge Tracing (KT) model to make inferences about students' knowledge and learning. Based on a widely used questionnaire, we measured students' level of self-discipline. When we analyzed the relation of students' self-discipline with their knowledge attributes, we found that high...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Data Analysis, Self Control, Knowledge Level, Learning, Intelligent Tutoring Systems,...
In a marketized environment, ESL providers, in common with other postcompulsory educational institutions, canvass student satisfaction with their services. While the predominant method is likely to be based on tick-box questionnaires using Likert scales that measure degrees of satisfaction, qualitative methodology is an option when rich data is desired. The well-established Critical Incident Technique (CIT) is particularly useful in this regard as an exploratory methodology with potential to...
Topics: ERIC Archive, English (Second Language), Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction,...
Weighting and variance estimation are two statistical issues involved in survey data analysis for large-scale assessment programs such as the Higher Education Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Literacy Assessment. Because survey data are always acquired by probability sampling, to draw unbiased or almost unbiased inferences for the populations, weights are required in making use of estimators such as a Horvitz-Thompson type. Variance estimation provides the basis for reporting...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Weighted Scores, Sampling, Statistical Analysis, Higher Education, Surveys,...
At least some of the reasoning processes involved in argumentation rely on inferences which do not fit within the traditional categories of inductive or deductive reasoning. The reasoning processes involved in plausibility judgments have neither the formal certainty of deduction nor the imputed statistical probability of induction. When utilizing these judgments, persons employ heuristic principles which operate as tacit decision rules. Plausible reasoning is characterized by defeasible...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Beliefs, Cognitive Processes, Cognitive Style, Decision Making, Epistemology,...
The resources necessary to create, administer, and score performance assessments in science were studied. RAND and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) designed performance tasks for science in grades five and six as part of a larger study of the feasibility of science performance assessment. Tasks were developed in pairs in task shells called inference and classification. A total of 2,200 students in both grades participated. Fifth graders completed the two UCSB tasks and sixth...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Classification, Comparative Analysis, Costs, Educational Assessment, Elementary...
This paper lays out a framework for comparing the qualities and the quantities of information about student competence provided by multiple-choice and free-response test items. After discussing the origins of multiple-choice testing and recent influences for change, the paper outlines an "inference network" approach to test theory, in which students are characterized in terms of levels of understanding of key concepts in a learning area. It then describes how to build inference...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Cognitive Psychology, Competence, Elementary Secondary Education, Inferences,...
An innovative reading comprehension curriculum that recruits social cognition in the teaching of visualizing, making inferences, and literature concepts was created, thereby achieving the first aim of the research. The Reading Rangers (RR) program was based on three research-based learning principles that were relied on in converting reading comprehension to a social domain. The RR curriculum was designed to capitalize on the social reasoning strengths of low-income children that have been...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Reading Programs, Grade 3, Urban Education, Low Income, Elementary School Students,...
From the bitsavers.org collection, a scanned-in computer-related document. mit :: ai :: aim :: AIM-732
Topics: curvature, parts, surface, concave, minima, partitioning, hoffman, recognition, richards,...
The purpose of this study was to examine Turkish English as a Foreign Language Learners' (EFL) handling of unknown words while reading English texts. The study also examines the relationship between these learners' perceptions and actual practices in the employment of knowledge sources while trying to guess the meaning of unknown words. The participants involved in this study were 40 pre-service teacher education students between the ages of 18-22 years old. Data were collected through mixed...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Inferences, Vocabulary Development, Foreign Countries, Correlation, Student...
The pragmatic expressions of Argentine Spanish (e.g., "bueno, viste, no? mira") are defined as deictic signals. They are deictic because they indicate elements of the communicative situation: transitions between text segments, conversational roles, or the social relationship between participants. They also signal contextual suppositions and help the hearer derive specific inferences. The basic simultaneous localizing and signalling functions on discursive and interactional planes are...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Discourse Analysis, Form Classes (Languages), Inferences, Interpersonal...
In the development of distance learning, advances in cognitive science merge with new technology to deliver instruction worldwide. However, one major difficulty in evaluating the efficacy of these tools is determining which elements of instruction truly lead to observed changes in student performance. As content, pedagogical methods, and media are intertwined, identifying the "active ingredients" is an essential element of facilitating training that is of high quality and minimizes...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Research Design, Research Methodology, Inferences, Validity, Instructional Design,...
Comprehending a second language is a complex process that occurs with a few external signs along the way. Out of recent research has come a growing understanding that comprehension is not just understanding words, sentences, or even texts, but involves building a model within the mind of the comprehender (Hammadou, 1991). This paper aims at emphasizing the importance of using comprehension and word inferences ability to improve learner's ability to comprehend L2 texts.
Topics: ERIC Archive, Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction, Reading Strategies,...
There is a general agreement that critical thinking is an important element of 21st century skills. Although critical thinking is a very complex and controversial conception, many would accept that recognition and evaluation of assumptions is a basic critical-thinking process. When students use simple mathematical model to reason quantitatively about a situation, they usually do not consider which implicit assumptions they have made and, consequently, they do not evaluate if these assumptions...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Physics, Science Instruction, Statistical Analysis, Critical Thinking, Thinking...
An analysis of the role of the word "hence" and its near-synonyms examines the relationship between logic as a science, as a natural language, and as argumentation. The analysis is done in the context of elementary propositional logic. The first section is a limited discussion of the standard logician's treatment relegating "hence" to the realm of non-truth-functionality: that is, the truth-value of the compound proposition is not simply a function of the truth-values of its...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Connected Discourse, Discourse Analysis, Epistemology, Inferences, Intellectual...
Northwest Evaluation Association™ (NWEA™) is committed to providing partners with useful tools to help make inferences from the Measures of Academic Progress® (MAP®) interim assessment scores. One important tool is the concordance table between MAP and state summative assessments. Concordance tables have been used for decades to relate scores on different tests measuring similar but distinct constructs. These tables, typically derived from statistical linking procedures, provide a direct...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Scores, Inferences, Academic Achievement, Achievement Tests, Reading Achievement,...
The author offers an analysis of the failures and insights she experienced working with adolescents at a progressive school while discussing how the students understood and experienced race and identity -- their own and that of others. While she encountered students who were willing to take her into their worlds, her efforts fell flat when her questions turned out to be about their experiences of race and class. In response to such questions, Bauman received, on the whole, confusion, a few...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Speech Communication, Sexuality, Progressive Education, Sexual Identity, Role of...
The purpose of this study was to investigate differences between readers with different levels of comprehension skill when engaging in a causal questioning activity during reading, and the varied effects on inference generation. Fourth-grade readers (n = 74) with different levels of comprehension skill read narrative texts aloud and were asked causal questions at specific points during reading. Responses to questions were examined for the types of inferences the readers made during reading....
Topics: ERIC Archive, Reading Comprehension, Inferences, Questioning Techniques, Elementary School...
States are making progress in supporting effective data use, but the hardest work remains. Although states collect quality data and have enacted policy changes, they have not yet focused on meeting people's needs. This report includes the following: (1) Changing the Culture of Education Data Takes Systems, Policies, and People; (2) Data for Action 2012 Key Findings; (3) 2013 State Steps to Move the Needle on Data Culture; and (4) Conclusion. Appended are: (1) Detailed 10 State Action Status;...
Topics: ERIC Archive, State Action, Organizational Culture, Systems Approach, Educational Policy, Change...
Northwest Evaluation Association™ (NWEA™) is committed to providing partners with useful tools to help make inferences from the Measures of Academic Progress® (MAP®) interim assessment scores. One important tool is the concordance table between MAP and state summative assessments. Concordance tables have been used for decades to relate scores on different tests measuring similar but distinct constructs. These tables, typically derived from statistical linking procedures, provide a direct...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Scores, Inferences, Academic Achievement, Achievement Tests, Reading Achievement,...
The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of a newly developed modules, Interactive Web-Based Visualization Tools for Gluing Undergraduate Fuel Cell Systems Courses system (IGLU), on learning motivations of engineering students using two samples (n[subscript 1] = 144 and n[subscript 2] = 135) from senior engineering classes. The multivariate analysis results revealed that the participants had a significant increase in their learning motivation after the treatment with the IGLU modules....
Topics: ERIC Archive, Engineering Education, Web Based Instruction, Teaching Methods, Multivariate...
Theories of situated learning attempt to overcome the ill-structured nature of some domains of learning, and to use students' tendencies to construct knowledge representation on context and prior experience. Success comes when students apply abstract principles to real life. This study compares the effectiveness of two different lesson structures on helping students make inferences and predictions after studying a computer-based lesson of an interdepartmental information system. The two...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Abstract Reasoning, Academic Achievement, Case Studies, Comparative Analysis, Concept...
To study how the organization of information affects the way that information is interpreted, a total of 404 undergraduates in two studies (151 and 253 students, respectively) solved statistical reasoning problems based on data presented in a variety of types of graphs and tables. When assessing relative probabilities, students were equally successful at answering questions regardless of the data display type. When making data-based causal inferences, accuracy decreased and students were quite...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Causal Models, Data Interpretation, Graphs, Higher Education, Inferences, Information...
This paper briefly discusses four measurement challenges of data science or "big data" in educational assessments that are enabled by technology: 1. Dealing with change over time via time-based data. 2. How a digital performance space's relationships interact with learner actions, communications and products. 3. How layers of interpretation are formed from translations of atomistic data into meaningful larger units suitable for making inferences about what someone knows and can do. 4....
Topics: ERIC Archive, Measurement, Data Analysis, Psychometrics, Correlation, Inferences, Student...
The Ontario Ministry of Education recently implemented the Steps to English Proficiency (STEP) language assessment framework to build educator capacity for addressing the needs of English language learners (ELLs) in K-12 schools. The STEP framework is a set of descriptors-based language proficiency scales that specify observable linguistic behaviours from which educators can make inferences about students' English language development. Teachers use these proficiency scales to assess, document,...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Capacity Building, Language Proficiency, English (Second Language), Second Language...
Using generalizability (G-) theory and rater interviews as both quantitative and qualitative approaches, this study examined the impact of scoring methods (i.e., holistic versus analytic scoring) on the scoring variability and reliability of an EFL institutional writing assessment at a Turkish university. Ten raters were invited to rate 36 undergraduate argumentative essays first holistically and then analytically, with a three-week time interval. The quantitative results indicated that with...
Topics: ERIC Archive, English (Second Language), Second Language Learning, Second Language Instruction,...
This article explores the issues associated with developing ideas of informal inference and introduces the software package, TinkerPlots, as a tool to facilitate this development. The activities suggested in this article are intended for use with middle and secondary students (grades 6 to 10). The data and suggestions presented have arisen mainly from workshops with inservice middle school teachers and preservice primary teachers, and hence may provide models for similar sessions, as well as...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Middle School Students, Middle School Teachers, Inferences, Foreign Countries,...
This report examines student performance on a test composed of items developed to be aligned with the Charleston County School District (CCSD) Language Arts Comprehension Curriculum. The report contains a data analysis section that explains the relationship between two basic concepts of the Rasch measurement model, item difficulty and student ability. The report then discusses curriculum charts which have been constructed for grades 1 through 5. Item difficulty, student ability, and item...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Academic Ability, Curriculum Design, Difficulty Level, Elementary Education, Grade 1,...
The consequences of large state testing are often uniformity of expectations for achievement. The largest impact of higher standards, then, are realized by traditionally disenfranchised student populations, particularly the least affluent who are most likely to bear the yoke of low expectation. This paper advances S. Messick's (1981) fundamental validity concerns in a way that precludes a sharp distinction between evidentiary and consequential validity, and evaluates validity information from 3...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Academic Achievement, Achievement Tests, Disadvantaged Youth, Elementary Secondary...
In this paper, we examine the validity and precision of two nonexperimental study designs (NXDs) that can be used in educational evaluation: the comparative interrupted time series (CITS) design and the difference-in-difference (DD) design. In a CITS design, program impacts are evaluated by looking at whether the treatment group deviates from its "baseline trend" by a greater amount than the comparison group. The DD design is a simplification of the CITS design--it evaluates the...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Research Design, Educational Assessment, Time, Intervals, Reading Programs,...
Group norms are provided for the California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST)--College Level, a standardized 34-item multiple-choice test designed to assess the core critical thinking skills associated with baccalaureate general education. The CCTST offers three subtests conceptualized in terms of a national Delphi study on critical thinking. These three subtests--analysis, evaluation, and inference--correlate strongly with each other and the overall CCTST when used as either a pretest or...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Cognitive Tests, College Students, Critical Thinking, Deduction, General Education,...
This study compared the reading comprehension abilities of learning disabled (LD) students with the performance of both their age-peers and their reading-level peers. Subjects were 16 seventh- and eighth-grade LD students, 16 normal achieving eighth graders, and 16 normal achieving fifth graders. To assess the use of prior knowledge under varying conditions, reading passages included both familiar and unfamiliar topics. All passages tested inferential reading ability, since the answers to test...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Elementary Education, Grade 5, Grade 7, Grade 8, Inferences, Learning Disabilities,...
The design and development of a test of inference ability in reading comprehension for grades 6, 7, and 8 (the Phillips-Patterson Test of Inference Ability in Reading Comprehension) are described. After development of a contemporary theoretical framework for the test of inference ability in reading comprehension, the design, item development, and test development iterations of the test are outlined. The test was administered to 999 students from schools in Alberta, Newfoundland, Labrador, Nova...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Difficulty Level, Elementary Education, Elementary School Students, Grade 6, Grade 7,...
A study investigated whether readers infer automatically highly likely consequences of a state modification, intentional (action) or non intentional (event), described in short texts. Subjects, 48 psychology undergraduates at Paris VIII University (France), read explicit, predictable, or control forms of short passages using a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation procedure, after which they answered a question about the sentence and made a lexical decision. The lexical decision task used two SOAs...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Context Clues, Foreign Countries, Higher Education, Inferences, Reading...
A study examined the effects of age upon the amount and kind of explicit information in oral summary tasks of preschool and third-grade children. Findings show an important developmental change in the use and in the type of inferential operations. Preschool children used fewer connectors and were not as able to preserve the original order of propositions in the text compared to third graders. On the contrary, third-grade children showed the tendency to include most of the explicit information...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Comparative Analysis, Developmental Stages, Early Childhood Education, Elementary...
New technologies have completely altered the ways that citizens can access data. Indeed, emerging online data sources give citizens access to an enormous amount of numerical information that provides new sorts of evidence used to influence public opinion. In this new environment, two trends have had a significant impact on our increasingly data-driven society: 1) the increasing use of large-scale databases within the open data movement, and 2) the growing use of big data. The open data movement...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Tables (Data), Data Interpretation, Information Skills, Capacity Building, Teaching...
A new report published by the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions is a minor variant on six similar reports published by the Friedman Foundation over the past three years. The new report repeats some of the errors in the previous reports, and it follows a parallel structure, arguing that the costs of dropping out are dramatic for the state of Ohio, and that last-chance charter schools for dropouts can increase graduation and address the dropout problem. However, the report's claims...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Charter Schools, Graduation Rate, Dropouts, Educational Attainment, Literature...
This empirical study examines how English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners use their vocabulary knowledge for inferring meanings of unknown words in reading comprehension. The data, collected through interviews with young adult ESL students in Canadian universities, indicate that: (a) semantic and morphological aspects of vocabulary knowledge play an important role in learners' comprehension processes; (b) a positive relationship exists between certain aspects of learners' vocabulary...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Reading Comprehension, Cues, Universities, Semantics, Vocabulary Development,...
Developed for use in small groups, this unit focuses on developing skills pupils need if they are to progress from Level 3 to Level 4 in English of England's National Standards. It is meant to supplement, but not to replace, the English curriculum for Year 7 pupils. The unit is intended for Level 3 pupils working towards Level 4. It sets out to develop pupils' ability to "read between the lines": to use inference and deduction in order to understand what is meant, as well as what is...
Topics: ERIC Archive, British National Curriculum, Context Clues, Foreign Countries, Inferences, Lesson...
Although interview formats support rich data collection in conceptual change studies, interview formats limit sample sizes. This study explores the possibility of using constructed-response formats as an alternative or supplement for collecting similarly rich data across larger pools of subjects in conceptual change studies. While research in physics education has successfully employed a variety of constructed-response formats to explore important questions, less research has explored the...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Interviews, Sample Size, Change, Concept Formation, Inferences, Responses,...
Developing critical thinking since the educational revolution gave rise to flourishing movements toward embedding critical thinking (CT henceforth) stimulating classroom activities in educational settings. Nevertheless the process faced with complications such as teachability potentiality, lack of practical frameworks concerning actualization of CT tasks, and transferability obstacles, as well as lack of a homogeneous model of conceptualization of CT among educators. The present study made an...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Critical Thinking, Models, Transfer of Training, Literature Reviews, Teaching...
Stuart McLean refers in this commentary to Jeffrey Huffman's article "Reading Rate Gains during a One-Semester Extensive Reading Course" (v26 n2 p17-33 Oct 2014) [See: EJ1044344], in which Huffman reports that extensive reading (ER) was an effective way to provide large amounts of comprehensible input to foreign language learners, but that many teachers and administrators remained unconvinced, and that there was still insufficient evidence to support the claims that have been made...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Inferences, Evidence, Reading Strategies, Reading Achievement, Reading Instruction,...
This article reports the findings of a study that investigated the role of graphic novels in teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) to International Baccalaureate students (aged 15-16) in TED Ankara College Foundation Private High School. Two intact 10th grade classes were randomly assigned to the control and experimental groups who studied the play of "Macbeth" for various in-class activities. A questionnaire, semi-structured interview and achievement test (post-test) were...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Cartoons, Novels, Teaching Methods, English (Second Language), Second Language...
This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 19 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: (1) the relationship between the use of intonation and reading comprehension; (2) developmental and information processing factors in second and third graders' comprehension of cause-effect relationships; (3) the script schema in children's comprehension and memory; (4) the effect of metacognitive strategy...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Annotated Bibliographies, Cloze Procedure, Cognitive Style, Content Area Reading,...
This report describes the development and validation of the Test of Inference Ability in Reading Comprehension: a scaled-answer, multiple-choice test intended for use in Grades 6, 7, and 8. The report discusses the need for and conceptualization of assessment of inference ability; proposes standards and principles of inference appraisal; and discusses test design issues, specifically audience, kinds of discourse, topic familiarity, readability, test format, test length, and passage and item...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Foreign Countries, Grade 6, Grade 7, Grade 8, Inferences, Intermediate Grades, Junior...
Beyond the first several thousand most commonly used words in a language, direct vocabulary instruction is not efficient. Use of inferential skills then becomes the most effective way of learning new vocabulary; it is the way native speakers build their 60,000 word vocabularies. Because the skill is not automatically transferable, it must be systematically taught to students of foreign languages. This task is best accomplished with a good classification scheme for context clues. An improved...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Classification, Context Clues, Inferences, Reading Skills, Second Language Learning,...
This paper reports research into the linguistic and extra-linguistic or social-cognitive structure of problem presentation contexts. The effects of textual and social syntax were investigated, including the specific structure of the problem text by which situations, processes, actions, and number relations are implicitly or explicitly expressed, questioned, and commented upon. Also investigated was the nature of the pragmatic and social psychological context (case studies). The paper outlines...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Context Clues, Critical Reading, Deduction, Educational Sociology, Inferences,...
Northwest Evaluation Association™ (NWEA™) is committed to providing partners with useful tools to help make inferences from the Measures of Academic Progress® (MAP®) interim assessment scores. Recently, NWEA completed a concordance study to connect the scales of the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOL) reading and math tests with those of the MAP Reading and MAP for Mathematics assessments. In this report, we present the 3rd through 8th grade cut scores on MAP reading and mathematics...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Scores, Inferences, Academic Achievement, Achievement Tests, Reading Achievement,...
The current research is a descriptive study in which a survey model was used. The research involved chemistry (n = 26), physics (n = 27), and biology (n = 29) teachers working in Science High Schools and Anatolian High Schools in Turkey. An inventory that consisted of seven questions was designed to ascertain what teachers' think about the importance of science process skills in teaching science, to identify the frequency of these skills and the problems teachers encounter during their practice...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Science Teachers, Science Instruction, Science Process Skills, Teacher Attitudes,...
