Students’ beliefs about agentic engagement: A phenomenological study in urban high school physical science and engineering classes.
Agentic engagement refers to students’ proactive and constructive contribution into the flow of classroom instruction and activities. Given its potential as a student-initiated pathway to promoting motivation and learning, the goal of this study was to describe agentic engagement from the perspectives of racially diverse students in urban high school science classrooms. A secondary goal was to consider the relation between belonging to an underrepresented group in science (i.e., female, Black, and/or Latino) and thoughts and behaviors pertaining to agentic engagement. We conducted focus groups and interviews with 68 stud...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - December 30, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Promoting understanding of measurement and statistical investigation among second-grade students with mathematics difficulties.
This study investigated the initial efficacy of the Precision Mathematics Grade 2 (PM-2) intervention, a Tier 2 (print and technology-based), integrated STEM intervention designed to increase second-grade students’ mathematics achievement in the areas of measurement and statistical investigation. A total of 130 second-grade students with or at risk for MD participated in the randomized, controlled trial. Students were randomly assigned within classrooms to either treatment (PM-2) or control (business-as-usual) conditions. Findings indicated a pattern of “promise” for PM-2 improving student scores on a proximal assess...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - December 30, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Class composition, student achievement, and the role of the learning environment.
This study considers how class composition, in terms of between-student variability and the average level of achievement, is related to the academic development of students, and how these relationships can be explained by features of the class learning environment. At the start of secondary education, Flemish schools can decide autonomously how to group their students, leading to variation in class mean and class heterogeneity between classes. In a sample of 2,895 Flemish students from 158 classes, math achievement at the end of grade 8 was found to be unrelated to class heterogeneity, after accounting for previous achieve...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - December 30, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Promoting an agentic orientation: An intervention in university psychology and physical science courses.
Agentic engagement, or attempts to proactively influence instruction, predicts positive classroom climate and students’ motivation. As such, it is a potentially effective target for intervention, though causal evidence is limited. This investigation explored whether an agentic orientation could be cultivated through a brief, online intervention for university students and the potential benefits of such an intervention. Three randomized field experiments with college students in psychology (Study 1 and Study 2) or introductory physics and chemistry courses (Study 3) tested the effects of an agentic orientation interventio...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - December 30, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Does instructional quality mediate the link between teachers’ emotional exhaustion and student outcomes? A large-scale study using teacher and student reports.
A negative association between symptoms of teacher burnout (e.g., emotional exhaustion) and students’ academic outcomes has been demonstrated in previous research. Although, in theoretical models, it has been suggested that this association can be explained through changes in teachers’ instructional behavior, these mediating processes have not yet been empirically tested. Therefore, in the present study, we examined (a) whether teachers’ emotional exhaustion is related to students’ self-concept, interest, and achievement and (b) whether aspects of instructional quality, indicated by teachers’ emotional support an...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - November 29, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Math anxiety, self-centeredness, and dispositional mindfulness.
Math anxiety has received increasing focus in recent years, yet the causes for developing math-anxiety remain unclear. Whereas previous research focused on physiological/environmental causes, we examine the link between math-anxiety, dispositional mindfulness, and self-centeredness (operationalized as self-prioritization and decentering). The experiment was performed by 81 participants, and included the original perceptual shape-matching task, measuring the self-prioritization effect, and our novel perceptual number/equation-matching tasks, developed to examine self-prioritization under math-anxiety activation. We also mea...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - November 15, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Instructor–learner neural synchronization during elaborated feedback predicts learning transfer.
The provision of feedback with complex information beyond the correct answer, that is, elaborated feedback, can powerfully shape learning outcomes such as transfer, that is, the ability to extend what has been learned in one context to new contexts. However, an understanding of neurocognitive processes of elaborated feedback during instructor–learner interactions remains elusive. Here, a two-person interactive design is used during simultaneous recording of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals from adult instructor–learner dyads. Instructors either provided elaborated feedback (i.e., correct answer and...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - November 11, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Revealing dynamic relations between mathematics self-concept and perceived achievement from lesson to lesson: An experience-sampling study.
Academic self-concept and achievement have been found to be reciprocally related across time. However, existing research has focused on self-concept and achievement scores that have been averaged over long time-periods. For the first time, the present study examined intraindividual (within-person) relations between momentary (state) self-concept and lesson-specific perceived achievement (i.e., self-reported comprehension) in students’ everyday school life in real time using intensive longitudinal data. We conducted an experience-sampling (e-diary) study with 372 German secondary school students in Grades 9 and 10 over a ...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - November 11, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The efficacy of comprehension and vocabulary focused professional development on English learners’ literacy.
This study reports the effects of a distributed professional development model emphasizing reading comprehension and vocabulary practices in social studies on the content knowledge, vocabulary, and reading comprehension outcomes of upper elementary students identified as English learners (ELs). Schools were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: researcher-supported professional development (PD), school-supported PD, or business as usual (BAU; typical instruction). Findings from a prior randomized control trial revealed significant effects for both treatment conditions when compared with the BAU group for content kn...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - November 11, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Class-average achievement and individual achievement development: Testing achievement composition and peer spillover effects using five German longitudinal studies.
In recent studies, the existence and relevance of achievement composition effects on students’ individual achievement have been called into question because of the methodological challenges arising in multilevel analyses. Our study examined how class-average achievement is related to students’ achievement development across one school year. We used data from Germany, which has a secondary school system with large achievement differences between schools and classrooms due to rigid, explicit between-school tracking practices. We accounted for two methodological challenges, controlling for both selection bias and measurem...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - November 11, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Under which conditions are physical versus virtual representations effective? Contrasting conceptual and embodied mechanisms of learning.
Abundant prior research has compared effects of physical and virtual manipulatives on students’ conceptual learning. However, most prior research has been based on conceptual salience theory; that is, it has explained mode effects by the manipulative’s capability to draw students’ attention to conceptually relevant (visual or haptic) features. Yet, research based on embodied schema theory suggests that other mechanisms, which do not rely on students’ explicit attention to specific features, also affect students’ learning from manipulatives. This paper presents a study that contrasts predictions by different theor...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - November 4, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Why do students use strategies that hurt their chances of academic success? A meta-analysis of antecedents of academic self-handicapping.
Self-handicapping is a maladaptive strategy that students employ to protect their self-image when they fear or anticipate academic failure. Instead of increasing their effort, students may harm their chances of success by procrastinating, strategically withdrawing effort, or engaging in destructive behaviors like drug abuse, so that potential failure can be attributed to these handicaps rather than to stable personal characteristics (e.g., low intelligence). A large body of research has focused on potential antecedents of students’ self-handicapping, but the literature is fragmented and the evidence is often mixed. Thus,...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - October 28, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Relations among phonological processing skills and mathematics in children: A meta-analysis.
The present study presents a meta-analysis of the relations between phonological processing abilities and different mathematics subskills. Using a random-effects model with 94 studies (135 unique samples, 826 effect sizes), the present meta-analysis revealed a significant general association between phonological processing and mathematics (average r = .33, p (Source: Journal of Educational Psychology)
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - October 28, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Taking a free ride: How team learning affects social loafing.
This study examines simultaneously the degree to which goal orientation and changes in team learning (i.e., shifts in collective knowledge) affect social loafing. The authors use a multiwave design to explain changes in social loafing tendencies of 675 students working in teams. They conduct linear mixed effects modeling to show that individual team members who belong to teams that score higher than other teams on team learning throughout 9 weeks of teamwork experience a decrease in social loafing. Although learning and performance orientations are significantly related to initial self- or peer-rated social loafing, they c...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - October 25, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Learning and transfer effects of embodied simulations targeting crosscutting concepts in science.
This article describes two experiments where participants learned about exponential scales applied to measuring earthquakes (Richter scale) and the strength of acids/bases (pH scale). Whether participants engaged with an embodied simulation or used traditional instructional media for none, one, or both of these topics was manipulated across the two experiments. Experiment 1 recruited high school-aged participants and Experiment 2 recruited non-STEM undergraduate majors. Results from the experiments showed that using the embodied simulation led to greater declarative knowledge gains for the earthquake topic but not for acid...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - October 25, 2021 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
