This article discusses the attitudes and motivations of two Saudi children learning Japanese as a foreign language (hence JFL), a language which is rarely spoken in the country. Studies regarding children's motivation for learning foreign languages that are not widely spread in their contexts in informal settings are scarce. The aim of the study…

This work, situated in the Greek sociocultural context, attempts to analyze the time spent by primary school students on digital and traditional extracurricular activities and the impact of these activities on the educational outcome. The first objective was to determine, by means of a quantitative survey, if the children as "digital…

Challenges for researchers wishing to gain insights into student beliefs about mathematics and learning include the identification of prompts to which young children can respond easily and which have the potential to provide meaningful insights into their beliefs. This article reports on a selection of such prompts used within an exploratory study…

Background: STEM identity has emerged as an important research topic and a predictor of how youth engage with STEM inside and outside of school. Although there is a growing body of literature in this area, less work has been done specific to engineering, especially in out-of-school learning contexts. Methods: To address this need, we conducted a…

Research in adults has shown that novel words are encoded rather swiftly but that their semantic integration occurs more slowly and that studying definitions presented in a written modality may benefit integration. It is unclear, however, how semantic integration proceeds in children, who (compared to adults) have more malleable brains and less…

Given that today's children are prolific users of the internet, concern has been raised about the future impact of the digital footprints they are currently generating. Here, we report on the "Best Footprint Forward" project which utilised focus groups to investigate the digital footprint awareness of 33 children (ranging in age from 10…

Audiovisual media are part of children's daily life. They build and/or replace a part of the reality that is sometimes preceded. This paper is interested in one of the elements of the audiovisual binomial, the soundtrack, in order to analyse its meaning and sense from the children's point of view. The objectives are: to determine if the…

The longitudinal relations of domain-general and numerical skills at ages 6-7 years to 3 cognitive domains of arithmetic learning, namely knowing (written computation), applying (arithmetic word problems), and reasoning (arithmetic reasoning) at age 11, were examined for a representative sample of 378 Finnish children. The results showed that…

This longitudinal case study of a 10-year-old girl with autism and severe communication impairment measures the impact of the MORE (Means, Opportunities, Reasons and Expectations) approach to enhancing engagement and communication. Through detailed observation of video data over a period of 28 months, engagement behaviours including interaction…

This article builds on Allison James and Alan Prout's call to focus more on theorizing the social construction of time in childhood and explores how school, as an organization and an experience, influences students' conceptions of childhood and experiences of being a child. Extending the conception of time of childhood to include their future…

Background: Previous studies suggest that children with Down's syndrome (DS), a genetically based neurodevelopmental disorder, demonstrate motor problems and cognitive deficits. The first aim of this study was to examine motor skills and executive functions (EFs) in school-age children with DS. The second aim was to investigate the relationship…

This study trained children to master logical fallacies and examined how learning is related to processing efficiency and fluid intelligence (gf). A total of one hundred and eighty 8- and 11-year-old children living in Cyprus were allocated to a control, a limited (LI), and a full instruction (FI) group. The LI group learned the notion of logical…

The present study examined the relationships between shyness, a number of personal and interpersonal variables (i.e. social skills, self-esteem, attachment style, advanced Theory of Mind skills and peer relations) in a sample of 243 Greek pre-adolescents. Participants completed self-reports of the variables. Results indicated that females scored…

Background: Owing to the associations between diet and health, it is important that effective health promotion strategies establish healthful eating behaviors from an early age. We reviewed the intensity of school-based interventions aimed to modify dietary behavior in preadolescent and adolescents and related intervention characteristics to…

Background: Eating habits play a crucial role in weight control management; however, little research has examined whether frequency of breakfast consumption influences body mass index (BMI) in middle childhood. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to (a) determine the relationship between BMI and the frequency of breakfast consumption, (b)…