Empirical studies have demonstrated that students who are taught in a group of students with higher average achievement benefit in terms of their achievement. However, there is also evidence showing that being surrounded by high-achieving students has a negative effect on students' academic self-concept, also known as the big-fish--little-pond…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between the school context, the leadership of the school principal, and a set of process variables related to teachers and the educational climate, which have been shown to mediate the effects of the principal's leadership on schools and students. The authors examined the following…

The authors examined the extent to which classroom-specific relationships between students' gender and their reading achievement and enjoyment of reading are associated with student-perceived teaching quality. Based on a sample of 10,543 ninth-grade students from 427 classrooms, multilevel analyses revealed that effective classroom management,…

Self-determination theory (SDT) posits that teacher autonomy, competence, and relatedness support are crucial universal promotors for students' interest in learning, which is in line with the general aims of positive education. This study examines the relationship between the three dimensions of students' perception of Indonesian teachers´…

Many young readers fail to construct a proper mental text representation, often due to a lack of higher-order skills such as making integrative and inferential links. In an eye-tracking experiment among 141 Dutch eighth graders, we tested whether coherence markers (moreover, after, because) improve students' online processing and their off-line…

This article describes the development and validation of two forms of the Geometry Assessments for Secondary Teachers (GAST), which were designed to assess teachers' knowledge for teaching geometry. Both forms were developed by teams of mathematicians, mathematics educators, psychometricians, and secondary classroom geometry teachers. Predictive…

Teachers make a difference for the outcome of their students in science classrooms. One focus in this context lies on teachers' professional knowledge. We describe this knowledge according to three domains, namely (1) content knowledge (CK), (2) pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and (3) curricular knowledge (CuK). We hypothesise a positive…

This study investigates the relationship between school-level accountability practices and science achievement of 15-year-olds, across four counties: Australia, Korea, Portugal, and the United States. We used PISA 2006 data, since 2006 is the only administration that has focused on science. School-level accountability practices are here defined as…

This study investigated the effects of the "Expressive Writing (EW)" direct instruction curriculum on the expository writing skills of secondary grade students with serious emotional and behavioral disabilities (EBD). The "EW" program targets writing mechanics, sentence writing, and editing but does not include pre-writing…

Student engagement is associated with many positive outcomes, including academic achievement, school persistence, and social-emotional well-being. The present study examined whether the Freedom Writers Institute, a professional development program designed to improve teachers' skills in creating personalized learning environments, can increase…

Using Hierarchical Linear Modelling (HLM), this study aimed to identify factors such as ESL/ELL/EAL status that would predict students' reading performance in an English language arts exam taken across Canada. Using data from the 2007 administration of the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP) along with the accompanying surveys for students and…

The present study concurrently analyzed risk and protective factors on the individual and the class level related to bullying and victimization in ethnically diverse schools. The sample derived from the pre-test data of a national intervention evaluation study in Austria (ViSC) and comprised 1,450 students (48.8% girls) aged 11-15 (M = 12.31) from…