The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a high-probability request sequence on the latency to and duration of compliance to a request for completion of an independent math assignment. The participant was an elementary-school student with learning disabilities who exhibited noncompliance during math instruction. The results showed that high-probability requests were effect...

With today’s computer and telecommunications technologies, every young person can have a quality education regardless of his or her place of birth. This is the dream that Open Educational Resources (OERs), when viewed as a right rather than a privilege, are directed to realize. For developing countries, we propose a type of OER initiative that leverages not only technology but also the skills o...

This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural structures associated with women's underperformance on math tasks. Although women in a control condition recruited neural networks that are associated with mathematical learning (i.e., angular gyrus, left parietal and prefrontal cortex), women who were reminded of gender stereotypes about math ability did not recruit t...

This paper reports work in progress to build a Learning Companion, a computerized system sensitive to the affective aspects of learning, which facilitates the child’s own efforts at learning. Learning related to science, math, engineering, and technology naturally involves failure and a host of associated affective responses. This article describes techniques and tools being developed to recogn...

Our approach to the study of learning of mathematical problem-solving extends the notion of narrative learning environments to include the dynamics of collaborative dialogs and related emergent narratives. This perspective favours the conception of the dialogical aspects of interaction as shared achievements of coparticipants and as central meaning-making procedures, based on our qualitative an...

This research examined whether the tendency for girls to outperform boys in the classroom is due to differences in how girls and boys approach schoolwork. In 5th grade and then again in 7th grade, children (N=518) reported on how they approach schoolwork (i.e., achievement goals and classroom behavior), their learning strategies, and their self-efficacy in math; math grades and achievement test...

We report the results of a randomized controlled evaluation of the effectiveness of pedagogical agents as providers of affective feedback. These digital learning companions were embedded in an intelligent tutoring system for mathematics, and were used by approximately one hundred students in two public high schools. Students in the control group did not receive the learning companions. Results ...

The Holistic Evidence and Design (HEAD) study of U.K. primary schools sought to isolate the impact of the physical design of classrooms on the learning progress of pupils aged from 5 to 11 years (U.S. kindergarten to fifth grade). One hundred fifty-three classrooms were assessed and links made to the learning of the 3,766 pupils in them. Through multilevel modeling, the role of physical design ...

Learning of mathematical concepts is a crucial point for high school students as well as students in science and engineering disciplines. In order to facilitate the learning of these abstract concepts we have developed a system to interactively explore these concepts based on a multi-touch table. The table is used as I/O device to additionally stimulate the haptic sense and to allow simple and ...