The Quiet Time program provides a 15-min period at the beginning and end of the school day where students may practice Transcendental Meditation (TM) or another quiet activity such as reading silently to oneself. This study examined the impact of participating in Quiet Time on ninth-grade students (n?=?141) by comparing their outcomes to those of…

The aim of this study was to examine in visual and auditory reaction time of adolescents with respect to their academic achievement level. Five hundred adolescent children from the Turkey, (age=15.24±0.78 years; height=168.80±4.89 cm; weight=65.24±4.30 kg) for two hundred fifty male and (age=15.28±0.74; height=160.40±5.77 cm; weight=55.32±4.13 kg)…

Education is one of the strongest predictors of health worldwide. In South Africa, school dropout is a crisis where by Grade 12, only 52% of the age appropriate population remain enrolled. Survival analysis was used to identify the risk of dropping out of secondary school for male and female adolescents and examine the influence of substance use…

We investigated changes across grades in the cognitive demands associated with the organizing subprocess of writing. A total of 85 fifth (age M = 10.8), 88 seventh (age M = 12.9), and 79 ninth (age M = 14.6) graders composed either a procedural text or an expository description on a digital tablet, on the basis of a "scrambled ideas"…

This article presents two studies investigating the role of executive functioning in written text comprehension in children and adolescents. In a first study, the involvement of executive functions in reading comprehension performance was examined in normally developing children in fifth grade. Two aspects of text comprehension were…

Background: Despite much discussion on the role of education policy on school and student performance, we know little about the effects of school spending at the margin on student cognitive achievement beyond the effects of class size. Purpose: The paper examines the effects of annual ninth grade classroom hours in literacy and maths on ninth…

This research aimed to examine students' perceptions of their life skills while attending project-based learning (PBL) schools. The study focused on three questions including: (1) What are students' perceptions of their development of life skills in project-based learning schools?; (2) In what ways, if any, do students perceive an increase in…

Faced with meeting the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, schools are under pressure to have 100% of their students meet national standards in reading by 2014. For the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 school years, Sussex Technical High School (STHS) in Georgetown, Delaware chose to adopt Read Right, a reading comprehension improvement…

Solving simple arithmetic word problems is a major ability that children must acquire throughout the primary-grade mathematics curriculum. However, this skill is often challenging for them. For instance, "unknown referent problems" are more difficult to solve than "unknown compare problems." In unknown compare problems, the…

Objective: Participatory learning strategies are integral to the effectiveness of school-based health education programmes; however, use of such methods is not the norm in teaching. The omission of participatory learning strategies is a common form of programme breakdown leading to erosion of positive learning and behavioural outcomes. Based on a…

The authors intended to (a) identify the association between gender or grade level and teachers' homework (HW) feedback and (b) examine the relationship between teachers' HW feedback, HW-related behaviors (e.g., amount of HW completed), and academic achievement. Four hundred fifty-four students (Grades 5-12) participated in this study. The results…

Multisite trials can clarify the average impact of a new program and the heterogeneity of impacts across sites. Unfortunately, in many applications, compliance with treatment assignment is imperfect. For these applications, we propose an instrumental variable (IV) model with person-specific and site-specific random coefficients. Site-specific IV…

In this paper we present the results of an evaluation study of a development project for the introduction and use of tablet computers (iPads) at the lower secondary level in Nordlinga school, a compulsory school in Reykjavík. In the study, we assess the impact of the use of tablet computers on instruction and students' learning in grades 9 to 10,…

This study investigates the effectiveness digital game-based learning (DGBL) on students' problem solving, learning motivation, and academic achievement. In order to provide substantive empirical evidence, a quasi-experimental design was implemented over the course of a full semester (23 weeks). Two ninth-grade Civics and Society classes, with a…

In this article, a heterogeneous latent growth curve model for modeling heterogeneity of growth rates is proposed. The suggested model is an extension of a conventional growth curve model and a complementary tool to mixed growth modeling. It allows the modeling of heterogeneity of growth rates as a continuous function of latent initial status and…