Adolescents may be influenced both by their friends' behaviors and by the features of their friendships. To examine both types of influence, seventh and eighth graders (N = 297) were asked in the fall of a school year to report their involvement and disruption at school. The students also described the positive and negative features of their best friendships. Teachers reported on the students' ...

We applied a mixed-method research design to investigate the patterns of reasoning used by novice undergraduate chemistry students to classify chemical substances as elements, compounds, or mixtures based on their particulate representations. We were interested in the identification of the representational features that students use to build a classification system, and in the characterization ...

Previous research has shown that undergraduate science students learn from peer discussions of in-class clicker questions. However, the features that characterize such discussions are largely unknown, as are the instructional factors that may lead students into productive discussions. To explore these questions, we recorded and transcribed 83 discussions among groups of students discussing 34 d...

The production of phonological features of African American English (AAE) was examined for 64 typically developing African American children in the 2nd through the 5th grade. Students read aloud passages written in Standard American English. Sixty of the students read the passages using AAE, and 8 different phonological features were represented in their readings. Phonological features were mor...

At the University of Toronto at Scarborough, we provide enhanced flexibility to our students using a blended learning approach (i.e., the webOption) whereby classes are videotaped as they are offered in a traditional manner, then posted online for subsequent student access. Students can attend lectures live, watch them online at their convenience, or both. Previous research examining the webOpt...

abstract reading strategies are seen as supportive means to help learners process and comprehend english texts effectively. the present research probed to posit a discipline-specific model of reading strategies for iranian tefl postgraduate students. the motive behind developing a local model of reading strategy is twofold: first, a variety of postgraduate students admitted for m.a and ph.d. pr...

This research investigated whether the differences found between novices and experts in using surface and deep structures to categorize problems applied to the domain of statistics. Also explored was whether the methodology of a triad judgment task was reliable in discriminating how beginning and advanced students represent statistics problems. The task was designed in which source problems sha...

This paper describes features and purposes for opening the learner model to the learner. Building on previous studies of use of a range of open learner models, it considers the features that are preferred by university level, experienced open learner model users. Recommendations are presented to help guide open learner model designers in their choices of features to make available to learners, ...