It is well established that socioeconomic status, cognitive ability, and non-cognitive abilities such as self-efficacy are substantially associated with academic achievement. However, the specific relationships of these variables remain a relatively unexplored topic in regard to more recent and representative samples. The current study examined…

This study explored the differential contribution of cognitive and motivational factors on the comprehension of an expository text in secondary school students. One hundred and fifty-five 7th and 8th grade students were assessed in prior knowledge, inferences, metacognition, reading motivation, topic interest, and reading comprehension of history…

Multimedia integration signals highlight correspondences between text and pictures with the aim of supporting learning from multimedia. A recent meta-analysis revealed that only learners with low domain-specific prior knowledge benefit from multimedia integration signals. To more thoroughly investigate the influence of prior knowledge on the…

Problem-based learning (PBL) is a student centered approach whereby students deal with ill-structured problems while working in small groups. In this study, a path model was utilized to model the relationships among reasoning ability, learning approach, prior knowledge, motivational variables, and achievement in genetics in PBL classes. 126 eighth…