A Comprehensive Review of Educational Technology on Objective Learning Outcomes in Academic Contexts

Educational Psychology Review - Rapid advances in technology during the last few decades have provided a multitude of new options for teaching and learning. Although technology is being widely...     

Endogenous peer effects: Fact or fiction?

The authors examine endogenous peer effects, which occur when a student's behavior or outcome is a function of the behavior or outcome of his or her peer group. Endogenous peer effects have important implications for educational policies such as busing, school choice and tracking. In this study, the authors quantitatively review the literature on endogenous peer effects through the use of meta-analytic methods. They find a significant and positive endogenous peer effect. It appears to be a genuine empirical effect but is dependent on the measure of educational outcomes, the peer group, publication status, and publication year.     

感恩节的米饭

四年前,癌症带走了我的祖母;在此之前,我家族中国血统的一边,也就是我爸爸的那边,每年都会在祖母家里过感恩节。那一天,祖母家里总会被炉灶烘得暖洋洋的,因为祖母通常一大早就开了炉火烧煮个不停。我们的家族庞大,但祖母准备的宴席却总是更加盛大。她会烹制各种派、肉类、蔬菜和酿制菜式——这些菜肴都可口美     

Developing research capacity among graduate students in an interdisciplinary environment

A critical review of research to date suggests a need to explore the development of graduate student research capacity from the standpoint of graduate students. Six members of an interdisciplinary graduate student colloquium at the Centre for Youth and Society (Victoria, Canada) offer their perspective. Our research involved four phases, each illustrating the processes that refined our understanding of the components that contributed to the development of our graduate student research capacity. First, we engaged in several round-table discussions and created a conceptual map depicting components that were meaningful in developing our research capacity. Second, we examined previous work on graduate student research capacity development and compared this data to the conceptual map. Third, we conducted a thematic analysis of secondary data of graduated students with similar interdisciplinary training and involvement in the Centre. Finally, the data analysis was used to refine the conceptual map that may benefit educators and future graduate students. From the standpoint of students themselves, we discuss those components perceived as best contributing to the development of graduate student research capacity and highlight the importance of an interdisciplinary context and writing process.     

Contribution of discourse and morphosyntax skills to reading comprehension in Chinese dyslexic and typically developing children

This study aimed at identifying important skills for reading comprehension in Chinese dyslexic children and their typically developing counterparts matched on age (CA controls) or reading level (RL controls). The children were assessed on Chinese reading comprehension, cognitive, and reading-related skills. Results showed that the dyslexic children performed significantly less well than the CA controls but similarly to RL controls in most measures. Results of multiple regression analyses showed that word-level reading-related skills like oral vocabulary and word semantics were found to be strong predictors of reading comprehension among typically developing junior graders and dyslexic readers of senior grades, whereas morphosyntax, a text-level skill, was most predictive for typically developing senior graders. It was concluded that discourse and morphosyntax skills are particularly important for reading comprehension in the non-inflectional and topic-prominent Chinese system.     

Student Decision-Making about a Globally Familiar Socioscientific Issue: The value of sharing and comparing views with international counterparts

This paper focuses on the views of 16–17-year-old science students from England, Germany, Hong Kong and Sweden on whale hunting, and their perceptions of the views of their international counterparts. The students were all provided with the same decision-making task, discussed the issue in small groups and then presented their views on video, which were shared with their counterparts. The findings show that the decision-making task served to deepen and modify students' views across all nationalities, and the students generally valued and learned from the sharing of views with students of the same age from around the world. However, an important discovery was that the German students' opinions often ran counter to those from the other 3 locations, and the paper cautions against making broad-sweeping generalisations about students' views on socioscientific issues.     

Learning to Solve Challenging Percentage-Change Problems: A Cross-Cultural Study From a Cognitive Load Perspective

In an experiment, secondary students from Australia and Malaysia (n = 130) were randomly assigned to one of three approaches (equation, unitary, unitary-pictorial) to learn how to solve challenging percentage-change problems. In line with the differential types of cognitive load associated with the three approaches, the unitary-approach group outperformed both the unitary group and the equation group across Australia and Malaysia. In support of cross-cultural findings, the Malaysian students outperformed the Australian students for the equation approach but not the unitary approach nor the unitary-pictorial approach. The Australian students, in contrast, learned better with the unitary-pictorial approach. This study, overall, reveals the “gap” between the Asian and Western countries in the use of problem-solving approaches across different cultural settings.     

The pathway to English word reading in Chinese ESL children: the role of spelling

The present longitudinal study investigated the role of spelling as a bridge between various reading-related predictors and English word reading in Chinese children learning English as a Second Language (ESL). One hundred and forty-one 5-year-old kindergarten children from Hong Kong, whose first language (L1) was Cantonese and second language (L2) was English, were administered tests of phonological awareness, letter knowledge, English vocabulary, spelling and English word reading at three time points (T1, T2 and T3) at 3-month intervals over a 6-month period. Nonverbal IQ was included as a control variable. The results showed that phonological awareness, letter knowledge and English vocabulary at T1 all predicted English word reading (T3) through spelling (T2). Further mediation analyses showed that, for phonological awareness and English vocabulary, full mediation effects were found. For letter knowledge, a partial mediation effect was observed. These results suggest that, in Chinese ESL kindergarteners, reading-related predictors foster word reading via spelling, a process that intersects phonology, orthography and semantics. Practical implications of these findings were also discussed.