Cognitive neuroscience offers a series of tools and methodologies that allow researchers in the field of learning and instruction to complement and extend the knowledge they have accumulated through decades of behavioral research. The appropriateness of these methods depends on the research question at hand. Cognitive neuroscience methods allow researchers to investigate specific cognitive proc...

3-D virtual worlds are increasing in popularity as a medium for higher education. In this research, we assess the efficacy of two instruction strategies in a virtual world environment, Second Life, and their effects on interactivity, social presence, and perceived learning. The two instruction strategies are direct and interactive instruction strategies. Our findings suggest that the interactiv...

Cognitive neuroscience has gained significant insight into the mechanisms underlying mental lexicon and their impact on second language vocabulary learning. However, relatively little effort been put understanding how these may instructional practices. We attempt to bridge this gap. Towards that end, we first describe three main properties of lexicon: words have distinct form meaning representa...

Learning novel tasks is a complex cognitive activity requiring the learner to acquire diverse declarative and procedural knowledge. Prior ACT-R models of acquiring task knowledge from instruction focused on learning procedural knowledge from declarative instructions encoded in semantic memory. In this paper, we identify the requirements for designing computational models that learn task knowled...

In this review of the literature we examine empirical studies designed to teach the structure strategy to increase reading comprehension of expository texts. First, we review the research that has served as a foundation for many of the studies examining the effects of text structure instruction. Text structures generally can be grouped into six categories: comparison, problem-and-solution, caus...

Previous investigations into the optimal design of instructions for complex tasks have often failed to account for the possibility of individual differences in instruction efficacy. We examined how individuals with various cognitive styles differ in how they make use of and learn from instructions with differing levels of detail. Participants completed a realistic photo-manipulation task and a ...