The work we report in this special issue attempted to exploit the power of technology and cognitive theory to help make conceptual systems taught in large college courses truly useful in students' future lives. Facing evidence that traditional instructional models have not succeeded in this regard, we sought feasible course designs and computer-based tools that would close the gap between classrooms and practice. Using a tool for online course building that we developed during the course of our work, we designed and examined alternative theory-based instructional models that systematically integrated video case study with collaborative problem-based and text-based learning. The contexts of our research were online learning science courses for teachers taught at UW-Madison and Rutgers University. Our contribution summarizes 145

Video usage in educational contexts is on the rise. We examined 3 alternative theories about cognitive mechanisms of learning and their implications for instructional design when video is employed to enhance text-based learning. Hypothesis-testing procedures followed a falsificationist approach, grounded in philosophy of science literature. Undergraduate students acquired learningscience concepts through web-based activities that involved studying reading material. Participants contrasted video cases before reading in one experimental condition, and after reading in another. Participants in a control condition read the same texts but saw no video cases. Recall results after a 2-day delay favored the instructional design in which video cases were contrasted after reading a text, consistent with a schema-elaboration hypothesis.

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One hundred 6th graders studied a list of new vocabulary items according to either a semantic-context or mnemonic learning strategy, combined with either an individual or pair format for studying and testing. As has been demonstrated repeatedly in past research, substantial benefits were derived from mnemonic strategy use on measures of definition recall, as well as of students' ability to remember information from a narrative passage that featured the vocabulary items. This was true on both immediate and 1-week delayed performance tests. Mnemonically instructed students were also appropriately more confident of their correct responses and less confident of their incorrect responses. Of specific interest to the present study was that when a scripted pair-learning/testing format was also incorporated, selected vocabulary-learning benefits (relative to an individual learning format) were observed for both mnemonically and contextually instructed students. Moreover, in the mnemonic condition, studying as a pair and being tested individually was as effective as both studying and being tested as a pair, whereas in the context condition, studying and being tested as a pair was more effective than studying as a pair and being tested individually.Many reading specialists believe that explicit vocabulary instruction before reading is a critical component of subsequent reading comprehension (e.g., Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1982;Stahl & Fairbanks, 1986). Some believe in the value of good-oldfashioned repetition for learning new vocabulary definitions. Others, preferring semantic approaches, present new words in the company of definition-clarifying synonyms, examples, maps, or other explanatory information, through which the target words' meanings are inferred, refined, or elaborated. At the same time, extensive evidence has been assembled over the past 25 years to demonstrate the strength and durability of systematic mnemonic (memory-enhancing) strategies for the initial acquisition and subsequent application of unfamiliar vocabulary (for reviews, see

This article presents the findings of two experimental studies designed to investigate the use of different kinds of visual representations of mathematical relationships in helping college students solve probability word problems. Two types of multiple-event probability problems were presented: joint probability of independent events; and total probability of non-mutually exclusive events. Two treatment groups were created: the specific-representations group that was instructed in how to use tree and Venn diagrams; and the matrix group that was trained to use a matrix (a two-dimensional table). A control group was instructed only in the formulation of equations. Results from two separate experiments indicated that the control group outperformed the specific-representations group on their ability to transfer the problem-solving strategies they had learned to novel situations and that there was no difference between the matrix group and the other two groups on their ability to do this. Results further indicated higher cognitive load in the specific-representations condition, supporting the contention that a split-attention effect was responsible for the lower performance of that condition.