My-side bias is the tendency to ignore or exclude evidence against one’s position. The present study investigated ways of encouraging students to reduce my-side bias and generate more counterarguments in writing argumentative essays. Fifth-grade students (N=90) from elementary school in Japan wrote persuasive essays about school rule topics under three different conditions. 1) Strategy conditio...

The medical writings of early medieval western Europe c. 700 – c. 1000 have often been derided for their disorganised appearance, poor Latin, nebulous conceptual framework, admixtures of magic and folklore, and general lack of those positive features that historians attribute to ancient or later medieval medicine. This paper attempts to rescue the period from its negative image. It examines a n...

Dear Editor, Many years ago unprofessional supervisors were identified as one of the main reasons for the withdrawal of a student’s study. Recently in some universities, unethical supervision has become an increasing concern of students and ethic committees. The last few years has witnessed an increase in the withdrawal rate of students who quit their study because of the poor guidance of their...

The main purpose of this study was to investigate science, social studies, and classroom teachers’ reading and writing practices, and to investigate their beliefs about content area reading and writing. One hundred and forty-three teachers filled out the survey developed to learn their content area reading and writing practices and beliefs. In the second part of the study, semi-structured inter...

This paper presents an on-line handwriting authentication system for text-independent Chinese handwriting. The proposed strategy is implemented on the stroke level, and the writing strokes and interstrokes are separated stepwise. The writing features are extracted from the dynamics of substrokes and interstrokes, including the writing velocity, the pressure, and the angle between the pen and th...

This study attempts to elicit the perceptions and attitudes of EFL learners of the Preparatory Year Program at KSU towards dialogue journal writing as an EFL learning strategy. The descriptive research design used incorporated both qualitative and quantitative instruments to accomplish the objectives of the study. A learners’ attitude questionnaire and follow-up interviewswith learners from a r...