While it is hypothesized that providing instruction based on individuals’ preferred learning styles improves learning (i.e., reading for visual learners and listening for auditory learners, also referred to as the meshing hypothesis), after a critical review of the literature Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork (2008) concluded that this hypothesis lacks empirical evidence and subsequently des...

Languaging—that is, using language to mediate thinking, orally or in writing—facilitates second (L2) learning. As languaging requires the deliberate, analytical action of L2 learners, learners with higher aptitude are likely benefit more from than those lower aptitude. Thus, this study investigated extent which mediates effects written (WL) on Pre-intermediate Japanese university students were ...

In a field setting, physically attractive or unattractive male and female communicator-subjects delivered a persuasive message to target-subjects of each sex. Results indicated that attractive (vs. unattractive) communicators induced significantly greater persuasion on both a verbal and behavioral measure of target agreement. In addition, female targets indicated greater agreement than did male...

The school performance of the children of immigrants in the Canadian school system is analyzed using data from the first three waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY). School performance is measured in terms of ability at reading, writing, mathematics and overall aptitude. The parents’ and teachers’ assessments of the children’s performances are used, as are the ...

The Tactical Language and Culture Training System is interactive environment for learning foreign language and culture, designed to help people quickly acquire spoken communication skills. It is a serious game, combining interactive game experiences as well as interactive lessons. As part of our research, we wish to understand what individual learner characteristics predict successful learning ...

Teaching a second / foreign language has been a controversial issue during the past decades. There are sets of factors which influence how successful a person is at learning a second language. Littlewood (1984) stated that a person's motivation to learn and the qualities of the opportunities to learn are two of these factors. The third set of factors is those which make up the person's ability ...

UNLABELLED Recent findings have shown that people with higher musical aptitude were also better in oral language imitation tasks. However, whether singing capacity and instrument playing contribute differently to the imitation of speech has been ignored so far. Research has just recently started to understand that instrumentalists develop quite distinct skills when compared to vocalists. In the...

Advances in molecular technologies make it possible to pinpoint genomic factors associated with complex human traits. For cognition and behaviour, identification of underlying genes provides new entry points for deciphering the key neurobiological pathways. In the past decade, the search for genetic correlates of musicality has gained traction. Reports have documented familial clustering for di...

In this paper, we consider an issue of great interest to all students: fairness in grading. Specifically, we represent each grade as a student’s intrinsic (overall) aptitude minus a correction representing the course’s inherent difficulty plus a statistical error. We consider two statistical methods for assigning an aptitude to each student and, simultaneously, a measure of difficulty to each c...

Despite technical advances in brain machine interfaces (BMI), for as-yet unknown reasons the ability to control a BMI remains limited to a subset of users. We investigate whether individual differences in BMI control based on motor imagery (MI) are related to differences in MI ability. We assessed whether differences in kinesthetic and visual MI, in the behavioral accuracy of MI, and in electro...