While much work has emphasized the role of the environment in language learning, research equally reports consistent effects of the child's knowledge, in particular, the words known to individual children, in steering further lexical development. Much of this work is based on cross-sectional data, assuming that the words typically known to…

Background: Nomothetic, group differential, and idiographic approaches are all needed to fully understand youth development. However, most research on youth character development has traditionally relied on either the nomothetic approach to study whole sample changes or the differential approach to study changes in predefined groups (e.g.,…

Studies looking into second language development have shown that findings about a group of learners cannot be transferred to individual learners. In this study, we explored ways to meaningfully group individuals starting from the data and investigated whether this grouping can give extra information about learning trajectories that goes beyond the…

Research on self-assessment has overwhelmingly conceptualized it as a product and treated students as a homogeneous group, restraining our understanding of the topic. To address this gap, this study aimed to identify different student profiles based on their self-assessment and to examine how it related to their learning achievement over time.…

There has been a great deal of scholarly interest in trying to uncover the factors that account for variation in educational attainment. Equally important, but not yet fully answered, is why some people aspire for high levels of education and others do not and, moreover, why some people believe that they will reach their educational aspirations…

Background: Computational thinking (CT) has emerged as a critical component of 21st-century skills, and increasing effort was seen in exploring the development of CT skills in K-12 students. Despite cumulative research on exploring students' CT acquisition and its influencing factors, learners' development of the skill over time and the underlying…

In this paper, we report a longitudinal study of the effects of procedural task repetition on learners' task performance (i.e., syntactic complexity in relation to lexical complexity). We investigated how task repetition results in differences at the group and individual level across each task interval (T = 7). Intermediate-level Saudi learners of…

To illuminate individual differences in the development of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms in the general population, psychometric measures are needed that can capture general population-level symptom variation reliably, validly, and comparably from childhood through to the transition to adulthood. The ADHD subscale of the…

Although social and academic integration are considered significant predictors of academic success, little is known about their longitudinal development. In addition, cross-sectional research indicates differences in the integration process based on the sociodemographic background of students, but lacks longitudinal confirmation, especially in…

One long-standing theoretical model of shyness proposes that the origins and maintenance of shyness are associated with an approach-avoidance motivational conflict (Asendorpf, 1990), such that shy individuals are motivated to socially engage (high approach motivation) but are too anxious to do so (high avoidance motivation). However, this model…

Longitudinal data analysis has been widely employed to examine between-individual differences in within-individual changes. One challenge of such analyses is that the rate-of-change is only available indirectly when change patterns are nonlinear with respect to time. Latent change score models (LCSMs), which can be employed to investigate the…

Perceived control is an important psychosocial resource for health and well-being across the lifespan. Global control (i.e., overall perceived control) decreases over time in studies following people every few years to upwards of 10 years. Changes across wider intervals of the lifespan, however, have yet to be examined. Further, how perceived…

Developmental researchers commonly utilize multilevel models (MLMs) to describe and predict individual differences in change over time. In such growth model applications, researchers have been widely encouraged to supplement reporting of statistical significance with measures of effect size, such as R-squareds ("R[superscript 2]") that…

In recent years, mathematical models of decision making, such as the diffusion model, have been endorsed in individual differences research. These models can disentangle different components of the decision process, like processing speed, speed-accuracy trade-offs, and duration of non-decisional processes. The diffusion model estimates individual…

This study investigates the changeability of learning approaches via a longitudinal design (Study 1) and explores the factors that potentially influence the use of and change in learning approaches through a qualitative research method (Study 2) in a Chinese cultural context. In Study 1, 439 Chinese university students participated in the…