Background: A fundamental aim of standardized educational assessment is to achieve reliable discrimination between students differing in the knowledge, skills and abilities assessed. However, questions of the purity with which these tests index students' genuine abilities have arisen. Specifically, literacy and numeracy assessments may also engage…

Comparing deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) children with their hearing peers in learning Chinese, the study tested the lexical quality hypothesis (Perfetti, 1992, 2007), which asserts the importance of building orthographic, phonological, and semantic connections in high-quality lexical representations. DHH children and hearing peers matched on…

The current study investigated the influence of a play-based curriculum on the development of pretend play skills and oral language in children attending their first year of formal schooling. In this quasi-experimental design, two groups of children were followed longitudinally across the first 6 months of their first year at school. The children…

The present study aims to contribute to the understanding of the effects of music education, in particular music composition as a classroom activity for fifth- and sixth-graders. The intervention (experimental condition) focused on a three-step-model for music composition, based on the Cultural Historical Activity Theory of education, and has been…

The degree to which reading ability and intelligence, as measured by the Raven Progressive Matrices Test, were related was studied for 486 students in grades 2 through 12 in a small town, rural school system. Results indicate the strong and consistent relationship between general intelligence and reading ability. (SLD)