Silver linings and storm clouds: Divergent profiles of student momentary engagement emerge in response to the same task.
Previous research has demonstrated that student motivation and engagement can take different forms across a variety of tasks at school or college. However, no research has yet examined the forms of student momentary engagement that emerge in response to a single task. Adolescent students (N = 196) from two low-income secondary schools in Dublin, Ireland were given the same English grammar task to complete in a 10-min period. We used systematic observation and posttask self-report measures to collect data on momentary cognition, emotion, motivation, and behavior. Using latent profile analysis, we discovered seven main forms...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - July 23, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Distributions of textbook problems predict student learning: Data from decimal arithmetic.
This study investigated relations between the distribution of practice problems in textbooks and students’ learning of decimal arithmetic. In Study 1, we analyzed the distributions of decimal arithmetic practice problems that appeared in 3 leading math textbook series in the United States. Similar imbalances in the relative frequencies of decimal arithmetic problems were present across the 3 series: Addition and subtraction more often involved 2 decimals than a whole number and a decimal, but the opposite was true for multiplication and division. We expected children’s learning of decimal arithmetic to reflect these di...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - July 23, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
U.S. children’s understanding of the English alphabet: Its acquisition, conceptualization, and measurement.
Construct confusion and measurement challenges have plagued emergent literacy research for decades. Using a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design, this study evaluated the dimensionality of alphabet knowledge and identified the sequence of development of 8 alphabet knowledge skills. Eleven models were evaluated in a sample of 3,692 preschool- and elementary school-age children. Findings supported a unidimensional conceptualization of alphabet knowledge that includes letter name knowledge and letter sound knowledge but not the ability to discriminate letters from nonalphabetic characters. Test information curves and significance tes...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - July 13, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Prevention of reading difficulties in children with and without familial risk: Short- and long-term effects of an early intervention.
This study shows that a 2-year cost-effective early intervention can reduce the incidence of reading difficulties. However, it remains a challenge to make the intervention suited for children in which a lack of preliteracy skills merely seems to reflect a lack of learning opportunities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: Journal of Educational Psychology)
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - July 13, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Effects of digital learning skill training on the academic performance of undergraduates in science and mathematics.
Many science, engineering, technology, and math (STEM) majors fail to complete their degrees, and those who leave report they lack learning skills required for STEM coursework. In 2 studies, we examined the effects on students’ exam performances when they were assigned to complete a brief digital learning skills training program we embedded into their course site on the university learning management system for their large lecture science and math courses. Study 1 examined whether delivering brief trainings that teach learning skills to students directly within their STEM course site during the first weeks of class would...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - July 6, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Family and community resource and stress processes related to income disparities in school-aged children’s development.
Income disparities in children’s academic and behavioral skills have grown larger over the past 50 years. At the same time, economic segregation across communities has increased, raising questions regarding the role of community factors in explaining income gaps in children’s functioning. Combining geospatial data with longitudinal survey data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort of 2010–2011, an ethnically diverse, nationally representative sample of kindergarteners (N ≈ 17,600), this project explored how differences in community- and family-level resources and stressors help to explain ...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - July 2, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Academic acceleration in gifted youth and fruitless concerns regarding psychological well-being: A 35-year longitudinal study.
Academic acceleration of intellectually precocious youth is believed to harm overall psychological well-being even though short-term studies do not support this belief. Here we examine the long-term effects. Study 1 involves three cohorts identified before age 13, then longitudinally tracked for over 35 years: Cohort 1 gifted (top 1% in ability, identified 1972–1974, N = 1,020), Cohort 2 highly gifted (top 0.5% in ability, identified 1976–1979, N = 396), and Cohort 3 profoundly gifted (top 0.01% in ability, identified 1980–1983, N = 220). Two forms of educational acceleration were examined: (a) age at high school gra...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - July 2, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
In-class attention, spatial ability, and mathematics anxiety predict across-grade gains in adolescents’ mathematics achievement.
Identifying meaningful cognitive and noncognitive predictors of mathematical competence is critical for developing targeted interventions for students struggling with mathematics. Here, 317 students’ short-term verbal memory, verbal and visuospatial working memory, complex spatial abilities, intelligence, and mathematics attitudes and anxiety were assessed, and their teachers reported on their attentive behavior in 7th-grade mathematics classrooms. Bayesian regression models revealed that complex spatial abilities and in-class attention were the most plausible predictors of 7th-grade mathematics, but not word reading ach...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - July 2, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Effects of spatial training on mathematics in first and sixth grade children.
A pretest-training-posttest design assessed whether training to improve spatial skills also improved mathematics performance in elementary-aged children. First grade students (mean age = 7 years, n = 134) and sixth grade students (mean age = 12 years, n = 124) completed training in 1 of 2 spatial skills—spatial visualization or form perception/VSWM—or in a nonspatial control condition that featured language arts training. Spatial training led to better overall mathematics performance in both grades, and the gains were significantly greater than for language arts training. The same effects were found regardless of spati...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - July 2, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Comparing and combining retrieval practice and concept mapping.
Retrieval practice enhances the learning of educational materials, and prior work has shown that practicing retrieval can enhance learning as much as or more than creating concept maps. Few studies have combined retrieval practice with other learning activities, and no prior work has explored whether concept mapping and retrieval practice might produce especially robust effects when the two activities are combined. In two experiments, students studied educational texts and practiced retrieval (by freely recalling the texts), created concept maps, or completed both activities. In the combined-activity condition, students st...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - June 18, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Social contagion and high school dropout: The role of friends, romantic partners, and siblings.
Social contagion theories suggest that adolescents in relationships with same-age high school dropouts should be at a greater risk of dropping out themselves. Yet, few studies have examined this premise, and none have considered all potentially influential same-age intimates, focusing instead on only either friends or siblings. Moreover, a key influence in adolescents’ social worlds, romantic partners, has been ignored. The goal of this study was to provide a comprehensive view of dropout contagion by considering occurrences of dropout among friends, siblings, and romantic partners. Data came from a sample of Canadian ad...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - June 18, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Differential benefits of explicit failure-driven and success-driven scaffolding in problem-solving prior to instruction.
We report empirical evidence from a classroom intervention (N = 221), where we designed scaffolds to explicitly push student problem-solving toward success via structuring, but also toward failure via problematizing. Our rationale for explicit failure scaffolding was rooted in facilitating problem-space exploration. We subsequently compared the differential preparatory effects of success-driven and failure-driven problem-solving on learning from follow-up instruction. Results suggested that failure-driven scaffolding (nudging students to generate suboptimal solutions) and success-driven scaffolding (nudging students to gen...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - June 18, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Patterns of preschool teachers’ use of discourse strategies with individual Spanish-speaking dual language learners.
Person-oriented approaches can be used to identify how teachers may draw upon a combination of strategies when interacting with individual children. For nearly 1 third of children under the age of 8 who come from a household where a language other than English is spoken, it is crucial to identify patterns of teachers’ use of discourse strategies that are hypothesized as being particularly important in supporting their unique developmental strengths and needs. The current study used latent profile analysis to (a) describe patterns of child-level experiences of teachers’ use of discourse strategies among a low-income sam...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - June 18, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
A cross-lagged study of students’ motivation, academic achievement, and relationships with teachers from kindergarten to 6th grade.
This 3-wave longitudinal study explored the complex ways in which students’ motivation (motivational attitudes and beliefs), relationships with teachers (closeness, conflict, and dependency), and academic achievement (reading comprehension and math performance) inform one another from kindergarten through 6th grade. The sample included students (N = 1,267; 49.3% boys) and 207 teachers participating in the Dutch triennial COOL cohort study. At all waves, teachers reported on relationship quality and students’ motivational attitudes, and students completed nationally normed reading comprehension and math tests. Students ...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - June 11, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Alternative paths to improved word-problem performance: An advantage for embedding prealgebraic reasoning instruction within word-problem intervention.
The purpose of this study was to explore the paths by which word-problem intervention, with versus without embedded prealgebraic reasoning instruction, improved word-problem performance. Students with mathematics difficulty (MD; n = 304) were randomly assigned to a business-as-usual condition or 1 of 2 variants of word-problem intervention. The prealgebraic reasoning component targeted relational understanding of the equal sign as well as standard and nonstandard equation solving. Intervention occurred for 16 weeks, 3 times per week, 30 min per session. Sequential mediation models revealed main effects, in which each inter...
Source: Journal of Educational Psychology - June 11, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
