Iranian Journal of Learning and Memory

This research examined the effect of teaching art (motivational painting) on preschool students’ cognitive creativity and social skills. The research design of this quasi-experimental study includeda  pretest-posttest with a control group. 60 students aged  6 years old were selected by purposive sampling from all preschools and kindergartens in Tehran and divided into an experimental group (15 boys and 15 girls) and a control group (15 boys and 15 girls). The experimental group was subjected to the teaching art program of motivational paintings (Silver, 2000) for 12 sessions, two sessions a week, each 45 minutes. Cognitive creativity and social skills were measured by the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking [form B, 1974] and the Social Skills Rating Scale of Gresham and Elliot [parents' form, 1990]. The results were analyzed by Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), T-test, and Spearman's correlation coefficient. The findings indicated that motivational painting instruction had significant positive effects on the students’ cognitive creativity (p<0.01) and two subscales of social skills, namely cooperation and responsibility. The research showed that teaching motivational painting can be used by instructors as a useful and productive method to develop new curricula in order to escalate the positive creativity and social skills of learners in pedagogical institutions.

During the Coronavirus pandemic, online classes and exams became popular to protect people's health. Despite the benefits, there were security issues and exam cheating. This research was conducted with the aim of comparing the amount and type of cheating in online and face-to-face exams using a qualitative method. The statistical population was all male and female students of the sixth grade of Pirbakran city in the academic year 2021-2022. In this research, a mixed rural school was selected using available sampling method and a structured face-to-face interview was conducted with all 14 sixth-grade students of the school. The interview questions were written and checked in MAXQDA software version 2020. From the analysis of the interviews, it was concluded that the rate of student cheating in online tests is much higher than that in face-to-face tests. The most common methods of cheating in online tests are the use of textbooks, the help of classmates, and the use of the Internet. Also, the most common method of cheating in face-to-face exams was the help of a classmate, and they considered the objective questions in the exams to be one of the important reasons for the ease of cheating. According to the findings of the research, the exams should be held in person as much as possible. In order to reduce cheating in the design of face-to-face and online tests, it is better to use more conceptual, in-depth and descriptive questions not published on the Internet browser; design different questions for students and explain the importance of studying and the negative points of cheating for students; replace four-choice questions with explanatory questions; increase the distance between the students in the face-to-face exam and control to prevent the presence of embedded fraud; not to answer the questions by the invigilators, and check students' pockets and hands in order to prevent cheating and avoid providing them with multiple draft sheets.

Dyslexia is one of the neurodevelopmental disorders with interdisciplinary dimensions. The study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of computer-based Linguistic Games on semantic and phonological awareness of students with dyslexia. The study adopted a quasi-experimental design using pretest-posttest and a control group. The population of the study included all male students in the second grade with dyslexia, who were studying in the centers of learning disabilities in Mashhad- Iran. The research sample consisted of 20 students selected via convenient sampling method. The participants in the experimental group received 10 sessions of 45 minutes for training through the CBLG while the participants in the control group received the conventional training of learning disabilities in the centers. Language Development Test (TOLD-P3) was used in the pre-test and post-test to assess the semantic and phonological awareness of the students. The results of covariance (ANCOVA) showed that there was a significant difference between the mean scores of phonological (P< 0.05) and semantic (p< 0.001) awareness of the experimental and control groups. According to the findings, it became clear that training using educational linguistic games software package was more effective than conventional methods concerning the performance of semantic and phonological awareness.

Given that academic procrastination originates from various factors, two of the most important factors in this field are cyberspace addiction and executive functions. Therefore, this research aims to model structural equations for predicting academic procrastination based on cyberspace addiction and executive functions. The research method is a descriptive-correlation type of structural equation modeling. The statistical population of this research includes 8150 female first-secondary school students in the city of Kerman in the academic year 2022-2023; according to Morgan's table, 384 people have been selected as a sample using stratified random sampling. Widyanto and McMorran's (2004) cyberspace dependence, Brief's (2000) executive functions, and Solomon and Rothbloom's (1984) academic procrastination questionnaires were used to collect data. Data analysis was done with SPSS25 and AMOS24 software, and descriptive and inferential statistics such as mean, standard deviation, and structural equation modeling were used. The research results showed that the model for predicting academic procrastination based on dependence on cyberspace and executive functions has an acceptable fit. There is a significant relationship between cyberspace addiction, executive functions, and academic procrastination (p<0.05), so cyberspace addiction and executive functions simultaneously explain 0.70 of the variance of academic procrastination. Therefore, it can be concluded that the high dependence on cyberspace and spending much time aimlessly in this space cause students to procrastinate in doing their homework and to suffer from a kind of procrastination in academic subjects. Also, defects in executive functions aggravate the academic procrastination of students.

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated a rapid shift to online learning, making the community of inquiry (COI) framework increasingly relevant for creating meaningful and effective online learning experiences. However, the impact of COI presences (i.e., teaching, social, and cognitive presence) on students' learning outcomes has been inconsistent in the literature, and a recent meta-analysis has identified a publication bias in this relationship suggesting the need for further investigation. This study aimed to enhance our understanding of how the COI presence influences college students' learning outcomes and whether it has a mediating role in the effect of self-efficacy and motivation on e-learner’s academic achievement. In this cross-sectional study, using a correlational research design, among all graduate students studying in online courses, a total of 269 graduate students were selected from online programs in seven public universities in Iran between April 2022 and June 2023, to be the sample of the study. The data were obtained from the answers to the community of inquiry (COI) scale, self- efficacy scale, academic motivation scale and students’ last semester grade point average. To examine the questions of the study, a path analysis was applied whose results showed that motivation and self-efficacy affected the community of inquiry positively (p<0.000). Also, the community of inquiry affected learning performance positively (p<0.000). The outcomes can provide significant theoretical and practical contributions to the key stakeholders to design a satisfying and successful online curriculum for the post-COVID-19 era and offer valuable insights into the design of productive online learning communities.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effect of Gagne’s Learning Hierarchy on the cognitive and metacognitive skills of junior high school female students in Kerman. The research method was quasi-experimental with a pre-test/post-test and a control group. The statistical population of the research included all the junior high school female students of Kerman (N=1125) in the academic year of 2022-2023. From among these students, two classes of 20 students were randomly selected as the experimental and control groups. The Gagne’s Learning Hierarchy package was implemented in the experimental group and both groups responded to Rastegar Metacognitive Strategies Questionnaire (2006) and Karami Cognitive Strategies Questionnaire (2005) in the pre-test and post-test stages. The obtained data were analyzed using univariate covariance with SPSS 20 software. The findings of the research showed that there was a significant difference between the cognitive and metacognitive skills of the experimental and the control groups and the cognitive and metacognitive skills of the experimental group improved compared to those of the control group. These results showed that learning English can improve students' recognition of concepts, processing, learning, and self-control.