It is now widely accepted that the transmission of disciplinary knowledge is insufficient to prepare students leaving higher education for the workplace. Authentic learning has been suggested as a way to bring the necessary complexity into learning to deal with challenges in professional practice after graduation. This study investigates how South African higher educators have used emerging tec...

Complex skill acquisition by performing authentic learning tasks is constrained by limited working memory capacity (Baddeley, 1992). To prevent cognitive overload, task difficulty and support of each newly selected learning task can be adapted to the learner’s competence level and perceived task load, either by some external agent, the learner herself, or both. Health sciences students (N = 55)...

this article reports on the findings of a study that investigated the impact of manipulating task performance conditions on listening task performance by learners of english as a foreign language (efl). the study was designed to explore the effects of changing complexity dimensions on listening task performance and to achieve two aims: to see how listening comprehension task performance was aff...

Understanding whether another's smile reflects authentic amusement is a key challenge in social life, yet, the neural bases of this ability have been largely unexplored. Here, we combined transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) with a novel empathic accuracy (EA) task to test whether sensorimotor and mentalizing networks are critical for understanding another's amusement. Participants were pres...

this study is an attempt to investigate the nature of authenticity in two interviews: the interview section of the toefl (tse) and the speaking module of the ielts. after defining the term authenticity based on bachman (1990), and bachman and palmer (1996) it is argued that the h:lts interview is a more authentic test than the tse. this is done in two ways. first, by using bachman and palmer&ap...

A central problem in undergraduate mathematics education for future engineers consists the perceived and actual relevance of mathematical content. One strategy to strengthen both is let students experience how that content appears posing solving authentic problems from field engineering which have signed up study. This paper proposes a way develop such strategy, terms theoretical precision (e.g...