This paper reports on a qualitative study of students’ engagement with a Web-based inquiry environment aimed at prompting student reflection in processes of scientific inquiry. In order to demonstrate how prompts become structuring resources for students’ scientific inquiry, detailed analyses of students’ interaction processes are conducted. The students’ written responses to the reflection pro...

Essay questions designed to measure writing ability, along with open-ended questions requiring short answers, are highly-valued components of effective assessment programs, but the expense and logistics of scoring them reliably often present a barrier to their use. Extensive research and development efforts at Educational Testing Service (ETS) over the past several years (see http://www.ets.org...

not take the place of a standardized logistic regression coefficient for valuating the strength of the influences of the independent variables on the dependent variable, relative to one another.” The strength of each independent variable cannot be judged based on the magnitude of the OR, so that a larger OR for one independent variable might not have a stronger association than a smaller OR for...

Few medical journals specifically instruct authors to use the active voice and avoid the passive voice, but advice to that effect is common in the large number of stylebooks and blogs aimed at medical and scientific writers. Such advice typically revolves around arguments that the passive voice is less clear, less direct, and less concise than the active voice, that it conceals the identity of ...

ActivePrompts are a new technology from Rhetorical, designed to offer a quicker and cheaper alternative to using voice talents and recording studios for the creation of an application-specific prompt library. Most speech user interfaces optimize the quality of their speech output by using pre-recorded prompts. In these applications, TTS is often considered to be a fall-back technology to genera...

Abstract Greater emphasis on ethical issues is needed in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. The fiction for specific purposes (FSP) approach, using optimistic science texts, offers a way to focus reflection that capitalizes role models rather than negative examples. This article discusses the benefits of FSP STEM education more broadly, then explains how fiction...