Previous research has shown that three comparison types are involved in the formation of students' academic self-concepts: social comparisons (where students compare their achievement with their classmates), dimensional comparisons (where students compare their achievement in different subjects), and temporal comparisons (where students compare…

The consequence of a change in school leadership (e.g., principal turnover) on student achievement has important implications for education policy. The impact of such an event can be estimated via the popular Difference in Difference (DiD) estimator, where those schools with a turnover event are compared to a selected set of schools that did not…

Performance evaluation is based on comparison standards. Results can either be contrasted to former results (temporal comparison) or results of others (social comparison). Existing literature analyzed potential effects of teachers' stable preferences for comparison standards on students' learning outcomes. The present experiments investigated…

Reluctance of respondents to participate in surveys has long drawn the attention of survey researchers. Yet, little is known about what drives a respondent's decision to answer the survey invitation early or late during the field period. Moreover, we still lack evidence on response timing in longitudinal surveys. That is, the questions on whether…

The economic importance of design, and design engineers to the success of a company has led to the exponential growth in the demand for qualified design engineers. To fill this demand, colleges and universities provide the best training available so that, after graduation these engineers will provide significant input from the first day of work.…

The purpose of this state-of-the-art review is to provide a general overview of recent research on time distribution and second language (L2) learning with special implications for classroom settings. Several studies have been performed to examine how to best distribute the hours of L2 practice to maximize learning by comparing conditions that…

Practice in real-world settings exhibits many idiosyncrasies of scheduling and duration that can only be roughly approximated by laboratory research. Here we investigate 39,157 individuals' performance on two cognitive games on the Lumosity platform over a span of 5 years. The large-scale nature of the data allows us to observe highly varied…

Six-year college graduation rates for Hispanic and White students from 17 cohorts were analyzed using data from the U.S. Department of Education's IPED System. Results from regression analyses confirmed statistically significant positive linear trends for Hispanic and White students and statistically significant differences between the two…

The purpose of this study was to address the role of social comparison in determining individual development by exploring the relationship of four types of social comparison with academic persistence-procrastination and subjective well-being among Chinese adolescents (n = 530, M[subscript age] = 14.59) from both variable- and person-centered…

Starting in April 2025, ACT will introduce enhanced forms of the ACT® test for national online testing, with a full rollout to all paper and online test takers in national, state and district, and international test administrations by Spring 2026. ACT introduced major updates by changing the test lengths and testing times, providing more time per…

How do people come up with humorous ideas? In creative cognition research, exposure to good examples sometimes causes fixation (people get "stuck" on the examples) but other times sparks inspiration (people's responses are more creative). The present research examined the effects of funny and unfunny examples on joke production. A sample…

This paper presents the results of a study conducted to determine the importance of listening to music in relation to other music activities in teaching music in Croatian primary schools, and whether teachers' listening habits affect how much listening activity is used in music lessons. The results showed that in the teaching of music at the…

The effects of fluency-based instruction and accuracy-based instruction on contingency adduction were assessed using an alternating treatments design. Stimulus equivalence tasks were used to measure contingency adduction. Stimulus classes were composed of arbitrary visual forms. One treatment condition consisted of teaching fast, fluent responding…

Current laboratory-based practical classes are arranged so that all students can complete the required activities on time. With this system there is no incentive for students to optimize the time they spend in the laboratory or have awareness of whether they are conducting the activities in a timely manner. However, the acceptable timeframes for…

American higher education is under increasing pressure to demonstrate its effectiveness in enhancing student success and employability. Traditional metrics used by researchers and policymakers--such as time to degree completion, postgraduate employment, and income--have predominantly overlooked the diversity of student pathways during and after…