The independent influences of aging and schooling on the development of phonological awareness were assessed using a between-grades quasie.xperimental design. Both schooling (first grade) and aging (5-7 years) significantly improved children's performance on tests of phonemic segmentation, but the schooling effect was four times larger than the aging effect. The school-'"S effect »' «-y attributed to format reading instruction, whereas the aging effect probably reflects natural maturation and informal exposure to written language. These data support a strong mutual relation between reading acquisition and phonological awareness.Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize the internal phonemic structure of spoken words. It is usually assessed by testing the subjects' ability to isolate and manipulate individual phonemic segments in words.Although a child makes phonemic distinctions as soon as he or she can understand and produce speech, the ability to manipulate phonemic segments consciously develops only around the first grade. For example, Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, and Carter (1974) found that no prekindergarteners, only 17% of kindergarteners, but 70% of the first graders were able to parse words into phonemes.The significant improvement in phonological awareness in first graders may be primarily ascribed to one of two factors (which are not mutually exclusive):(1) cognitive-linguistic skills that mature at about the age of six, independent of formal reading instruction (Bradley & Bryant, 1983); or (2) learning to read in an alphabetic orthography (Berteison, Correspondence and reprint requests to

The study explored college instructors' and students' attitudes towards the usage of mobile devices (laptops and cell phones) for non-academic purposes during lectures. Students report excessive multitasking: usages of mobile devices for communicating with friends, gaming, etc. Instructors seem to have pretty good perceptions about the distribution of such usages. Most students accurately perceive the usage of mobile devices as disturbing instructors and peers, but they still believe such usage is legitimate! Instructors, on the contrary, feel it is not. Older students, as well, tend to think the usage of mobile devices during lectures is illegitimate. Results are discussed from the perspective of McLuhan's laws of media and from perspectives related to millennial students' unique characteristics.

No abstract

No abstract

Although Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are increasing in popularity, they have been subject to criticism due to the high dropout rate. This study examined the impact of an instructor's personalized email intervention on the rate of completion of a nine week course, which included seven weekly quizzes, and the rate of completion of the final exam. The participants, who took an Israeli noncredit academic MOOC on negotiation management, were randomly assigned to two groups. Treatment group participants (N = 576) who did not complete the weekly quiz received a tailored reminder by email from their instructor encouraging them to complete the quiz and offering them assistance in order to deal with the past week’s contents. The control group (N = 608) that did not complete the weekly quiz did not get any emails from the instructor. The impact of the intervention was measured in three different ways: the immediate-impact, the delayed-impact and a cumulative impact. The increase in quiz completion within a week after the instructor's email was defined as an immediate-impact. The increase in the completion of the next quiz was defined as a delayed impact. The increase in the final exam completion rates was defined as a cumulative impact. The results show that the weekly intervention had an immediate impact as well as a cumulative impact on the final exam completion rate. The results suggest that an instructor's acknowledgement and interest might increase learners' commitment to learning in a MOOC. This study aimed to gain insight into learners' propensity to stay active in a MOOC and to increase completion rates. Findings of this study can be useful to MOOC designers and instructors to design and facilitate more effective MOOCs for learners by using email interventions to prevent students from dropping out of courses.