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Reading comprehension and arithmetic skills are essential abilities for children, particularly at the early career. Examine the link between language proficiency and numeral information process amongst primary school children. This study examines numeral comprehension in 600 Chinese primary second graders with different levels of decoding and linguistic comprehension skills. Four groups of children were compared, including typical readers (TR), poor decoders (PD), poor comprehenders (PC) and general poor readers (GPR). Results showed that the four groups had similar performances in numeral comprehension when the answer options to a question on the quantity of numerals were presented in Arabic numbers. However, when the answer options to a question on the quantity of numeral information were presented in analogue nonsymbolic magnitude representations, the PC group outperformed the PD and GPR group. The findings of this study has demonstrated the link between language proficiency and numerical information process in reading comprehension.

Purpose: This study investigated irony comprehension by Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants, focusing on how prosodic and visual cues contribute to their comprehension, and whether second-order Theory of Mind is required for using these cues. Method: We tested 52 Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (aged 3-7 years) and 52 age- and gender-matched children with normal hearing. All children completed a Theory of Mind test and a story comprehension test. Ironic stories were presented in three conditions, each providing different cues: (a) context-only, (b) context and prosody, and (c) context, prosody, and visual cues. Comparisons were conducted on the accuracy of story understanding across the three conditions to examine the role of prosodic and visual cues. Results: The results showed that, compared to the context-only condition, the additional prosodic and visual cues both improved the accuracy of irony comprehension for children with cochlear implants, similar to their normal-hearing peers. Furthermore, such improvements were observed for all children, regardless of whether they passed the second-order Theory of Mind test or not. Conclusions: This study is the first to demonstrate the benefits of prosodic and visual cues in irony comprehension, without reliance on second-order Theory of Mind, for Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants. It implies potential insights for utilizing prosodic and visual cues in intervention strategies to promote irony comprehension.

In recent years, developing students' knowledge integration of specific topics through effective teaching methods has been a concern in science education. This study explored an alternative teaching method, which aims to help lower secondary school students develop their knowledge structure about buoyancy towards a logically integrated conceptual framework through enhancing their understanding of the nature of buoyancy. Specifically, this study constructed a conceptual framework on buoyancy and a set of matching test questions to map out the three levels of knowledge integration of students, and designed and implemented a teaching experiment of promoting students' understanding of the nature of buoyancy. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, it was found that the knowledge integration development of the treatment group was significantly better than that of the control group. The results indicated that enhancing students' understanding of the nature of buoyancy can effectively improve their knowledge integration of buoyancy. Accordingly, improving knowledge integration through enhancing students' understanding of the nature of the specific scientific concept may be a new direction for future research.

This experiment employed viewing time methods to investigate the effects of individual differences in visuospatial working memory (VWM) on the processing of older adults' bridging inferences in the understanding of visual narratives. The results showed that older adults could make bridging inferences in visual narrative processing, and that VWM had no significant effect on the generation of older adults' bridging inferences in visual narrative comprehension. The findings of this study have the potential to enrich and advance the theories and models related to discourse comprehension and its inference processing, and they would have important implications for using visual media to facilitate training in inference processing.

To examine the relationship between early number sense and later symbolic arithmetic competence and how they are connected in young Chinese children. The present study utilized a longitudinal sample of 115 Chinese children aged 3 to 6. Young children completed measures to assess number sense, visual spatial skills (in the fall of their second kindergarten year, K2), arithmetic competence (in the spring of their second kindergarten year, K3), working memory, verbal comprehension, and inhibitory control (in the fall of their first kindergarten year, K1). The results showed that number sense predicted arithmetic competence six months later. Meanwhile, visual spatial skills played a mediating role in this association, but it became non-significant when working memory, verbal comprehension, and inhibitory control were added as covariates. These longitudinal findings confirm the close association between number sense and arithmetic competence in young Chinese children.

Praise and criticism have long been reported as central feedback designs in academic writing, yet their relative influences on students' reception have not been fully investigated. This study employed six feedback statements (2 valences * 3 writing areas) and collected students' (N = 56) ratings of each statement's perceived comprehension and usefulness. The results showed that while both feedback valences were well understood, praise was rated significantly higher than criticism in usefulness, especially for the abstract dimension of reasoning. The students also claimed that praise not only boosted motivation but also facilitated efforts to internalise and transfer the feedback knowledge. Suggestions were formulated to harness such emotional and cognitive advantages of praise in feedback design and academic writing pedagogy.

Switching between languages requires the participation of executive functions (EFs) which comprise both the 'hot' affective aspects (hot EFs) and the 'cool' cognitive aspects (cool EFs). However, the role of these EFs in language switching is not clear. This study employed a word valence categorization task to explore the effects of hot (i.e. emotional valence and emotional congruency) and cool (i.e. inhibitory control ability, IC ability) EFs on high- and low-IC Chinese-English bilinguals' language switching costs. The results showed smaller language switching costs for positive than negative emotional words, for emotional incongruent than congruent trials, for positive than negative emotional words in emotional congruent trials and for negative emotional words in emotional incongruent than congruent trials. Moreover, hot and cool EFs worked interactively, with larger language switching costs for negative emotional words and the same pattern in emotional congruent trials for high-IC participants over low-IC ones. These results indicate that various aspects of hot EFs affect language switching costs individually and interactively, while also modulate the effects of cool EF on language switching costs during Chinese-English emotional word comprehension. These findings have implications for extending the Bilingual Interactive Activation plus (BIA+) model by incorporating both hot and cool EFs.

The present study examined the relative effectiveness of bilingual subtitles for L2 viewing comprehension, compared to other subtitling types. Learners' allocation of attention to the image and subtitles/captions in different viewing conditions, as well as the relationship between attention and comprehension, were also investigated. A total of 112 Chinese learners of English watched an English documentary clip in one of four conditions (bilingual subtitles, captions, L1 subtitles, no subtitles) while their eye movements were recorded. The results revealed that bilingual subtitles were as beneficial as L1 subtitles for comprehension, which both outscored captions and no subtitles. Participants using bilingual subtitles spent significantly more time processing L1 than L2 lines. L1 lines in bilingual subtitles were processed significantly longer than in L1 subtitles, but L2 lines were processed significantly shorter than in captions. No significant relationship was found between the processing time and comprehension for either the L1 or L2 lines of bilingual subtitles.

The paper measures the impact of the developed approach to teaching the translation theory, using the psycholinguistic features of the English language. The factor analysis validation framework was used to control the data of this study. 190 s-year students from Xxx University majoring in translation studies were surveyed. The results of the post-assessment of groups B show an increase in scores according to three special criteria: the value of the language mental representation understanding level increased by 25.3%, language mechanisms processing by 30.8%, the indicator of linguistic resources by 44.6%. Additionally, students from mini-groups B received an average of general assessment criteria 7.2% higher than the control group. Correlation analysis suggests that as the mastery level of special skills in the English language theory increases, the effectiveness of the pedagogical process will also increase, considering psycholinguistic features of the English language. The research findings may be relied upon when building the expertise in new practices intended to develop effective teaching strategies enhancing the competencies of future translators. Application of the research findings can improve the effectiveness of teaching translation theory to students in the People's Republic of China.

This paper investigates the comprehension of Relative Clauses (RCs) in 15 Mandarin children with suspected Specific Language Impairment (SLI) (aged between 4; 5 and 6; 0) and 29 typically developing (TD) controls. Results from a Character Picture Matching Task indicate that (i) the subject RC was better understood than the object RC in children with SLI, but there was no asymmetry in the comprehension of the two RCs in TD children; (ii) the performance of children with SLI was significantly worse than that of their TD peers; (iii) children with SLI were prone to committing thematic role reversal errors and middle errors. In order to overcome the shortcomings of previous accounts, we therefore put forward the Edge Feature Underspecification Hypothesis, which can not only explain the asymmetry of comprehension seen in children with SLI but also shed light on the nature of errors committed by them in the task.

Dynamic assessment (DA) integrates assessment and instruction into an organic unity aimed at promoting learner development through mediation sensitive to the individual's (or in some cases, a group's) current abilities. This article reports on the construction of a model of mediation framed within DA for English-as-a-foreign-language listening comprehension. The model was implemented in a 1-semester comparative experimental study in 2 parallel classes of Grade 8 in an urban middle school in central China. For mediation, the experimental class (EC) received four DA sessions aligned to their emerging abilities at all listening stages. Statistical results showed that students in EC outperformed those in the control class significantly in both a posttest and a near transfer assessment test, a more complex task intended to assess development in a more accurate manner, although they showed no significant advantage in the far TA test. Microgenetic analysis of the development of a sample of 9 students revealed that the mode of mediation used during enrichment permitted the teacher to ascertain students' listening problems, including their struggles with phonology, lexicon, grammar, and strategy use. The value of the DA mediation model is discussed as a dialectical unity of both a diagnostic tool and a pedagogical framework in the context of young L2 learners.

Purpose: Using the printed-word paradigm with eye tracking, this study conducted three experiments to examine (a) how multiple words in spoken overlapping ambiguity strings (OASs) are activated, (b) how word frequency influences the word segmentation of spoken OASs, and (c) whether the multiple words in spoken OASs are activated competitively or independently. Method: In this study, participants listened to a four-character spoken OAS (ABCD) and were presented with a visual display composed of a semantic associate of the "middle word" (BC; Experiments 1 and 2) or the "left word" (AB; Experiment 3) and two distractors. In Experiment 1, the word frequency of the middle words was manipulated to be higher than that of the neighbor words. In Experiment 2, the word frequency of the middle words was manipulated to be either higher or lower than that of the neighbor words. In Experiment 3, participants listened to either spoken OASs (ABCD) or spoken unambiguous strings (ABEF). Results: In Experiment 1, we observed a significant semantic competition effect; that is, more fixations fell on the semantic competitors than on distractors, suggesting that the semantic information of the middle words in the spoken OASs was activated. In Experiment 2, the semantic competition effect was only observed in the high-frequency condition and was absent in the low-frequency condition. In Experiment 3, the results showed significant semantic competition effects for the left words under both conditions, and the observed effect was similar between the ambiguity condition and the control condition. Conclusions: These findings show that multiple words in spoken OASs are all activated and the activation level is modulated by word frequency. In addition, multiple words in the spoken OASs may be processed independently during spoken comprehension.

This qualitative phenomenological study examines a cohort of multilingual employees' translanguaging practices in business communication at seven multinational corporations in China. It is found that these employees integrate various linguistic features of named languages stored in their linguistic repertoires; they spontaneously prioritize the linguistic features of different named languages in different contexts to achieve effective communication. They value sense-making more than grammatical correctness in communication practices, so they deploy multiple semiotic resources in translanguaging practices. This paper suggests that multilingual employees' translanguaging literacy should be valued as their linguistic/human capital since it provides them with communication resources in a globalized business context. This paper advances understandings of translanguaging and enriches research practice, broadening the research scope of transnational business communication by expanding translanguaging practices from the bilingual education field to a multilingual, transnational workplace context.

Increasing attention is being given to traditional culture-orientated product design. While Chinese design students lack a deep understanding of traditional Chinese culture and its applications, little in-depth research has investigated this issue. Thus, how educators should guide and improve their students' cultural design in the context of current Chinese design education and practices remains unclear. This study explores these design students' cognition and application of different levels of Chinese cultural design elements to provide new insights for improving and adapting cultural design teaching practices. This study comprised three related stages. In stage 1, we extracted three levels of 15 representative cultural design elements from Chinese culture based on cultural hierarchy theory. In stage 2, we examined the students' cognition about different levels of cultural elements using two questionnaire surveys. In stage 3, we further compared the differences in the application of cultural elements between experts and students to explore the students' cultural application ability. The results showed that different design students have differing cognition of Chinese culture, which can be divided into two categories: i.e., cognitive deficiency or sufficiency. Compared with experts, students lack application experience and ability in the design elements of inner 'intangible' and middle 'behavioural' levels, because of their insufficient understanding of these two cultural design levels. These findings may reveal deficiencies in Chinese design students' cognition and application, and provide targeted cultural teaching guidance.

Sense-making is the process by which people give meaning to their collective experiences. Sense is viewed as knowledge, and the environment in which the sense is made is interconnected with communication effectiveness. Considering the critical role of sense-making in the learning process, scholars have emphasised the significance of providing interactive learning environments for students' effective learning. By employing a modified version of Dervin's sense-making theory, this qualitative case study explores the nature of students' sense-making processes in a peer self-founded online learning group without teacher involvement. The study analysed online Chat logs generated by 30 English language learning students from a secondary school in China. The Chat logs were students' discussions on a module of English writing: "Read and then write". The researchers made meaning of the students experiences through their dialogue and interaction, which revealed the essence of a sense-making process: gap facing, gapdefining, gap bridging and gap bridged. The observations were followed with students' interviews held to identify the factors contributing to an interactive learning environment for effective sense-making. The study found that the affordances of an interactive environment impact the communication outcomes through the interactional achievement in the sense-making process.

Purpose: It has been reported that tone language-speaking children with autism demonstrate speech-specific lexical tone processing difficulty, although they have intact or even better-than-normal processing of nonspeech/melodic pitch analogues. In this early efficacy study, we evaluated the therapeutic potential of Auditory-Motor Mapping Training (AMMT) in facilitating speech and word output for Mandarin-speaking nonverbal and low-verbal children with autism, in comparison with a matched non-AMMT-based control treatment. Method: Fifteen Mandarin-speaking nonverbal and low-verbal children with autism spectrum disorder participated and completed all the AMMT-based treatment sessions by intoning (singing) and tapping the target words delivered via an app, whereas another 15 participants received control treatment. Generalized linear mixed-effects models were created to evaluate speech production accuracy and word production intelligibility across different groups and conditions. Results: Results showed that the AMMT-based treatment provided a more effective training approach in accelerating the rate of speech (especially lexical tone) and word learning in the trained items. More importantly, the enhanced training efficacy on lexical tone acquisition remained at 2 weeks after therapy and generalized to untrained tones that were not practiced. Furthermore, the low-verbal participants showed higher improvement compared to the nonverbal participants. Conclusions: These data provide the first empirical evidence for adopting the AMMT-based training to facilitate speech and word learning in Mandarin-speaking nonverbal and low-verbal children with autism. This early efficacy study holds promise for improving lexical tone production in Mandarin-speaking children with autism but should be further replicated in larger scale randomized studies.

Because of the taboo in Chinese culture, there is little research on Chinese children's perception of "death". The research on preschoolers' cognition of "death" could deepen our research on children's cognition process, guide children's life education, and improve the psychologic intervention on the children who experience such torment at their home. This research, with six variables of death concept, applicability, universality, irrevocability, dysfunctionality, causality, and judgment, investigated 180 3-6-year-old Chinese children's general perception of "death", and their cognition of such six sub-concept of "death". The experiment results demonstrated the status of Chinese children's cognition of "death": (1) 3-6-year-old children understand "death" more accurately as they grow older; (2) There is no significant difference in the perception of "death" between different gender children; (3) Children who have experiences with pets have more accurate understanding of "death" than those not; (4) Children have unbalanced understanding of six sub-concept of "death"; and (5) Children's perception of "death" is self-centered. On the basis of such findings, the author advocates to include "death" education into children's daily education, and make use of picture books and the experience with pets to help them understand "death" properly.

This work investigates students' familiarity and understanding of laboratory safety knowledge among students in the College of Environmental Science and Safety Engineering at Tianjin University of Technology. A total of 1301 undergraduates and graduates participated in a survey of students' safety knowledge. The questionnaire covered the GHS pictograms, common hazardous chemicals, and basic laboratory safety practices and emergency responses. The results showed that students confused the oxidizer pictogram with the flammable pictogram and that they had lower correct response rates for the typical properties of chemicals as well as deficiencies in emergency response knowledge. In addition, postgraduates and students with higher expected safety knowledge also demonstrated deficiencies in laboratory safety knowledge. Strategies for improving students' laboratory safety learning outcomes include testing of safety knowledge and popularization of GHS classification and pictograms at all levels of safety education. Furthermore, safety education should be integrated into university courses to make safety a priority.

A deep understanding of mechanical waves is crucial for students to succeed in studying many advanced physics topics. Studies in existing literature have revealed that students often have widespread difficulties and misconceptions on wave propagation. This research develops and applies a conceptual framework model to examine students' understanding of mechanical wave propagation from the knowledge integration perspective. Based on the existing literature and interview results, the conceptual framework model of wave propagation was developed and used to guide the development of a multiple-choice test that targets the assessment of knowledge integration in students' understanding of wave propagation. The assessment was given to first-year college students enrolled in a calculus-based introductory physics course at a medium-ranking Chinese university. The results suggested that after traditional instruction the majority of the students only achieved intermediate level knowledge integration with fragmented knowledge structures and lacked a deep conceptual understanding of wave propagation. The conceptual framework and assessment outcomes were then used to inform the development of new instruction, which made explicit emphasis on teaching the central idea of the conceptual framework and making connections to the central idea within students' knowledge structures. The effectiveness of the instruction was evaluated with the same pool of college students separated into an experimental group and a control group. Pre-post testing results suggested that the new instruction significantly improved students' performance on questions that require an integrated knowledge structure, indicating advancement in knowledge integration and deep understanding.

Negative effects of seductive details have been well documented. One current line of research focussed on solutions to reducing the seductive details effect is becoming increasingly promising. Contributing to this line of research, this study investigated whether perceptual load moderated the seductive details effect. The study used a 2 × 2 factorial design with seductive details (seductive details vs. no seductive details) and perceptual load (high vs. low) as two independent variables. Participants (N = 123) were randomly assigned to one of four groups to study materials on atomic structure. The dependent measures were tests of free recall and of conceptual understanding. Results indicated that under high perceptual load, participants performed equally on measures of free recall and conceptual understanding, regardless of the seductive details condition. Under low perceptual load, participants not receiving seductive details outperformed those who received seductive details on both dependent measures. These findings suggest that learners are susceptible to the seductive details effect when perceptual load is low. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This case study shows how three Master's students engage affectively, behaviourally and cognitively with supervisor feedback on thesis drafts. The data sources are students' drafts, supervisor's oral and written feedback, and student interviews. Six themes of student engagement are identified in the data, namely (1) "gaining reassurance from the supervisor's compliments," (2) "trusting the supervisor's feedback due to his position of authority," (3) "following the supervisor's advice selectively," (4) "engaging with academia by incorporating more citations," (5) "not fully understanding the feedback and (6) "letting it go and moving on."

Although higher education transnational programs are becoming increasingly prevalent worldwide, little is known about student's conceptions of learning, which could help to improve the education quality of such programs. This study investigated Chinese undergraduates' conceptions of learning in programs cooperatively run by Chinese and non-Chinese universities. The research methodology adopted is phenomenography. Data are collected through semi-structured interviews with 30 undergraduates and analyzed following the phenomenographic principles to identify the referential and structural aspects of each conception. Ultimately six main conceptions of learning and four sub-conceptions are identified, namely, learning as increase of new knowledge, memorization with/without understanding, application with/without understanding, making sense of the knowledge acquired, gaining a new perspective to view reality and personal change and growth based on an extensive understanding of learning. Generally speaking, the relationship found between conceptions is hierarchical, yet the sub-conceptions or branches are also notable. The findings not only demonstrate the complexity of Chinese students' conceptions of university learning under a cross-culture learning and teaching context, but they also point to the possibility of there being something new to discover, even for some familiar and well-established conceptions. The implications and recommendations for future studies are provided in the end.

English language corpora, containing the widest possible range of varieties of English, provide empirical date concerning language usage, helping to redefine the notion of "standard" to which language learners should aspire. This paper takes as its theoretical framework an approach to corpus-aided discovery learning in which the central role of corpora is seen as that of providing rich sources of autonomous learning activities. Here, by investigating Chinese EFL learners' use of the infinitive "to" in the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), the suggestion is put forward that availability of different corpora and software tools and the ability to combine them in different ways may help learners develop an understanding of the patterned quality language and be conducive to more appropriate use, as learners are not just to observe patterns, but also to develop hypotheses as to their variability. Finally, a corpus-aided approach is proposed to provide insight into new perspectives to revolutionize EFL instruction.

Students have various conceptions of electrolytes in learning chemistry. The aim of this study is to identify 10th grade students' understanding of the electrolyte concept by using a phenomenographic method. Eight students, whose abilities were at different levels, were selected and interviewed. The findings show that four distinctive categories of students' conceptions of electrolytes are demonstrated, and a hierarchy in terms of the logical progression among them can be developed. Finally, teaching implications are given.

Light interference is an essential topic for understanding the wavelike nature of light, however, there are limited studies on modeling and assessing students' misconceptions and learning difficulties in this area. Based on the knowledge integration modeling approach, a conceptual framework for light interference is developed and used to model student understanding and guide the development of an assessment tool on light interference. The conceptual framework provides a representation of students' reasoning pathways to clearly show their connections through different conceptual components and contextual features of problem-solving settings. This type of representation focuses on showing students' knowledge structures regarding the features of integration and fragmentation. Experts' reasoning pathways always flow through a central idea of a concept with well-established connections to a wide range of contextual features and conditions. These connections form an integrated knowledge structure, which demonstrates deep understanding. In contrast, novices often focus on surface details without linking the central idea, forming fragmented local connections that link directly between contextual features and task outcomes. As a result, novice students' problem solving often relies on memorization of formula and solutions without any deep understanding. Through testing and interviews at a large Chinese university, a light interference test (LIT) has been developed and validated. Assessment results also demonstrate that students with a strong conceptual understanding of the central idea are able to apply expertlike reasoning to familiar and novel questions regardless of the contextual details. Meanwhile, students with weaker or nonexistent understanding of the central idea often struggle when novel situations are presented. LIT provides a useful tool to measure students' conceptual understanding on light interference and probe thought pathways of students' reasoning that can further indicate students' knowledge structure and levels of deep understanding.

Language is a part of culture, and plays a very important role in the development of the culture. Some sociologists consider it as the keystone of culture. They believe, without language, culture would not be available. At the same time, language is influenced and shaped by culture, it reflects culture. Therefore, culture plays a very important part in language teaching, which is widely acknowledged by English teaching circle. This thesis depicts the relationship between culture and language. As a result, the gap of cultural differences is one of the most important barriers in English teaching and study. Among the students, lacking of cultural background knowledge can, to a great extent, hold up the improvement of English teaching and become a noticeable problem. At present, the objective of English teaching has broken free from the traditional listening, speaking, reading and writing, and the demand for cultural background knowledge in language learning has been gradually concerned. Presentation of history of the country which has the target language, cultural background knowledge and customs is the proposed solution to the problem. This paper mainly discusses how to present cultural background knowledge and expose learners to it in the need of English teaching at Chinese schools so as to solve the problems caused by cultural differences, help learners grasp the crux of the language and develop their comprehensive English ability.

This study explored the structural relationships among secondary school students' conceptions, self-regulation, and strategies of learning science in mainland China. Three questionnaires, namely conceptions of learning science (COLS), self-regulation of learning science (SROLS), and strategies of learning science (SLS) were developed for investigating 333 Chinese high school learners' conceptions, metacognitive self-regulation, and strategies in science. The confirmatory factor analysis results verified the validity of the three surveys. Moreover, the path analyses revealed a series of interesting findings. Learners with lower-level COLS, namely "memorizing," "testing," and "practicing and calculating," tended to use surface learning strategies such as "minimizing scope of the study" and "rote learning." However, learners' higher-level COLS, namely "increase of knowledge," "applying," "understanding," and "seeing in a new way," had complicated connections with their SROLS and SLS. On the one hand, learners' higher-level COLS had negative relations to "minimizing scope of the study" and "rote learning." On the other hand, their higher-level COLS were powerful predicators for their metacognitive self-regulation and further affected their use of "deep strategy" and "rote learning." Though Chinese secondary students with higher-level COLS usually have a negative view of "rote learning," the functioning of their metacognitive self-regulation may change their initial attitudes towards the surface strategy. Learners with higher-level COLS still used "rote learning" as a prior step for achieving deep learning. Therefore, we concluded that the SROLS played an important mediating role between the COLS and SLS and may change learners' original intention to utilize learning strategies.

Traditional ESL instruction accepts the idea that a student's ability to visualize text and to create mental pictures of letters and whole words is important in comprehension. Closed-captioned video presentations can be useful in English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction. Video topics rich with the history and culture of the target language provide a meaningful context for language learning. The author started using closed-captioning in 1991 to assist children to learn to read. Students reported that closed-captioning and sub-titles helped them with spelling, reading, writing, and word recognition, which seems reasonable. In this article, the author shares how closed-captioned videotext with high audio/video correlation allows the learner to see, hear, and contextualize words and sentences simultaneously.

Vignette design has been largely neglected in anchoring vignette studies. This study aimed to contribute to the science of vignette design by developing and evaluating vignettes for measuring vision in rural China. Cognitive interviews were conducted among 36 participants in a Chinese middle school. The respondents either directly evaluated vision of the vignette character (i.e., noncomparative judgment) or compared their own vision with that of the vignette character (i.e., comparative judgment). It was found that a hypothetical person in the vignette was successfully envisioned by participants in grade 7 and beyond. However, more than half the participants were unable to accurately estimate distances expressed in meters. Some participants were critical in self-evaluation, yet tolerant of others' performance. Participants more easily produced an answer and had greater confidence in the answer in comparative judgment than for noncomparative judgment. We conclude with recommendations for designing concise and complete vignettes and suggest the use of comparative rather than noncomparative judgment.

Perspectives of students on what constitutes source-code plagiarism may differ based on their educational background. Surveys have been conducted with home students undertaking computing and joint computing subject degrees at higher education institutions throughout the UK, China, and South Cyprus, and a total of 984 responses have been statistically analysed to determine the common areas of understanding and misunderstanding among students on various topics related to source-code plagiarism. The study identifies those topics which are well understood, and those topics which are not properly understood across the different groups of students, and is the first study which specifically discusses Cypriot student perceptions on source-code plagiarism. This study provides useful information to educators (teaching home and international students) who wish to better inform their students on the issues of plagiarism and source-code plagiarism. Finally, the survey results revealed that although students who were informed about plagiarism better understood what actions constitute plagiarism, some topics were still unclear among students regardless of the students' educational background and whether they had been previously informed about plagiarism.

The present study examines how various types of attention cueing and cognitive preference affect learners' comprehension of a cardiovascular system and cognitive load. EFL learners were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: non-signal, static-blood-signal, static-blood-static-arrow-signal, and animation-signal. The results indicated that attention cueing yielded similar performance but helped reduce the learners' mental load. No interaction effects between cognitive style and the experimental conditions on the learners' total score and cognitive load were observed. Both high- and low-visualizers benefited equally well from attention cueing. However, an interaction effect in one subtest was observed indicating that attention cueing can result in learning interference among high-visualizers. Contrary to the hypothesis, the presence of attention cueing did not optimize conceptual understanding.

Conceptual understanding is a major aim of mathematics education, and concept map has been used in non-mathematics research to uncover the relations among concepts held by students. This article presents the results of using concept map to assess conceptual understanding of basic algebraic concepts held by a group of 48 grade 8 Chinese students. The concept maps constructed by these students were scored by the number of links and propositions based on linking phrases, and these scores were analyzed to yield three types of results as follows: (a) relations associated with individual concepts, (b) relations between pairs of concepts, and (c) relations among all the given concepts at the whole class level to reveal the structure encompassing these concepts. It was found that the students tended to link from superordinate concepts to subordinate concepts. They seemed to hold different ideas about the relations among the concepts since there were more weak links than moderate and strong links in the collective map. A gap in the students' understanding of "equations" and "functions" was captured. The future use of concept map to study conceptual understanding of specific mathematics topics should deal with the issues of training and translation of findings into classroom practices.

The purpose of this study was to describe teachers' perspectives and comments about their reading curriculum and instruction at different school levels. A brief historical examination of the English instruction and the contemporary education policies in China was provided. Twelve Chinese teachers of English at different schools levels participated in the study and were interviewed twice. The results revealed these teachers' perspectives and comments on the "2001 revised curriculum" ("MOE, 2001a") and the focus of their reading instruction, which included alphabet, common phrases, fluency, vocabulary, grammar, and comprehension.

This article argues that task representation should be considered as part of the construct of classroom-based academic writing. Task representation is a process that writers move through when creating a unique mental model of the requirements for each new writing task they encounter. Writers' task representations evolve throughout the composing process and continue to change even after a writing assignment is submitted for evaluation. The article presents data from an ethnographic study of an argumentative writing-from-readings assignment given in an academic writing class. The data show that the task representations of the four participants heavily influenced the form and substance of their final written products. It was particularly difficult for these second-language writers to interpret task cues emanating from the teacher and context to understand the boundaries of the writing-from-sources task and construct appropriate task representations. Consequently, two received a score of 0% for plagiarism and one intentionally avoided part of the source use requirement of the writing task. Because the participants' writing performance was partially a result of the accuracy and appropriateness of their task representations, this article argues that task representation should be considered when defining the construct of an academic writing-from-sources assessment. (Contains 2 footnotes.)

In different countries, the use of pictorial information symbols to convey warnings and instructions is becoming more common. An important reason for this is that people from a variety of cultures can understand graphical symbols. However, symbols developed in one culture may not have the same meaning for people from other cultures. This study compared the comprehension of Dutch and Chinese participants of 30 pictorials from a series of "universal" disaster pictorials by Dutch designers. Participants completed a Web survey measuring comprehension levels and judgements of five design features (semantic closeness, familiarity, meaningfulness, simplicity and concreteness) of the pictorials. Furthermore, the effect of showing context pictures on comprehension was investigated. Dutch participants showed a better comprehension of the pictorials than Chinese, indicating that the designers probably used conventions more familiar to Dutch than to Chinese people. However, the relative comprehensibility of different pictorials was similar: generally, the same pictorials were easier or more difficult to understand for both groups. Photographs conveying context information improved comprehension levels for Dutch and Chinese participants. This kind of contrastive research is useful for exploring interpretation differences of pictorials intended for use in different cultures. (Contains 5 tables and 2 figures.)

Purpose: The communication development of children adopted from China and Eastern Europe was compared by region of origin at 6 and 12 months after adoption. Method: Twenty children, recruited before or immediately following their adoption, participated in the study. Measures were collected between 2 and 6 months after adoption (Time 1) and between 12 and 14 months after adoption (Time 2). The children's ages ranged between 11-22 months and 22-34 months, respectively. Parent-reported vocabulary comprehension and expression and behavioral communication assessments were administered. Results: No significant differences between region of origin were found at Time 1. At Time 2, significant group differences in expressive language performance were found, with children adopted from China and Eastern Europe demonstrating different patterns of English language development. Conclusion: Early prelinguistic measures may provide prognostic indicators for later English language development. Children adopted from different countries where they are initially exposed to different birth languages may acquire English differently.

This study investigates Chinese and U.S. teachers' cultural beliefs concerning effective mathematics teaching from the teachers' perspectives. Although sharing some common beliefs, the two groups of teachers think differently about both mathematics understanding and the features of effective teaching. The sample of U.S. teachers put more emphasis on student understanding "with" concrete examples, and the sample of Chinese teachers put more emphasis on abstract reasoning "after" using concrete examples. The U.S. teachers highlight a teacher's abilities to facilitate student participation, manage the classroom and have a sense of humor, while the Chinese teachers emphasize a teacher's solid mathematics knowledge and careful study of textbooks. Both groups of teachers agree that memorization and understanding cannot be separated. However, for the U.S. teachers, memorization comes after understanding, but for Chinese teachers, memorization can come before understanding. These differences of teachers' beliefs are discussed in a cultural context.

Using an experimental approach, this study examined the relative effectiveness of varying the use of songs (lyrics and music) on vocabulary acquisition, language usage, and meaning for adult ESL students in the People's Republic of China. While the use of songs is generally enthusiastically endorsed by ESL teachers, few empirical studies have formally assessed music's actual effectiveness on language learning. Results of this study showed that varying the degree of use of songs produced differential English language achievement. Specifically, the subjects who were exposed to the most music obtained higher achievement and attitude posttest scores immediately following treatment, as well as on the delayed post-test three weeks following treatment. Given the equivocal results found in previous research, and the fact that previous studies did not examine music's effectiveness for Chinese ESL students, this study makes a contribution by systematically examining the efficacy of song use in the ESL classroom with Chinese students.

Many mathematics educators believe that it is insufficient for students' knowledge of the division of fractions to be limited to the invert-and-multiply algorithm, arguing that students' learning of mathematics must go beyond rote memorization of procedures. Teachers ought to carefully consider what students need to learn beyond the algorithmic procedure; developing students' conceptual understanding of division is not a trivial task. This article discusses the various ways students need to learn about fractions through dividing them, and why this knowledge is important. Chinese and American perspectives and approaches in teaching fractions are compared. (Contains 5 figures.)

The study explores development of the concept of death among 204 Chinese children and adolescents and analyzes the relationships between death concept development and background variables. A coding manual for content analysis of death constructs adapted from R. A. Neimeyer et al. (1983) was used to classify each construct in the paragraphs written by participants regarding their views of death. The 6 categories most frequently identified were Internal Causality, Negative Emotion State, External Causality, Nonexistence, Negative Body State, and Existence. Death-related experiences did not significantly influence concepts regarding death, while significant differences emerged as a function of grade, gender, religion, and family death discussion for several death constructs. Compared with earlier American samples, Chinese children and adolescents identified less with choice and purposeful death constructs and were less likely to view death in terms of personal choice and morals or in terms of psychological or natural meaning. Whether the differences were due to cultural, methodological or age factors deserves further study. Finally, this study concludes with some recommendations for the future study of death constructs. (Contains 6 tables.)