Background: Students from low-socioeconomic status backgrounds (LSES) are underrepresented in STEM education, including in the biological sciences. As one of the foundational STEM disciplines, biology represents an interesting case study in that women earn the most undergraduate degrees, a trend that holds across racial/ethnic groups. However,…

Stress is a health-compromising issue for undergraduate students that has only seemed to worsen during the COVID-19 pandemic. While most universities offer traditional medicinal treatments, prior research has suggested that some students prefer to utilize complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) to cope with stress and illness. Given the…

This study examined the relationship between parental expectations, parental criticism, irrational career beliefs, intolerance of uncertainty, and career decision-making difficulties. The research sample comprised 470 high school students. The results indicated that parental expectations negatively influence career decision-making difficulties…

Despite its intellectual and philosophical significance, cosmology and general relativity (GR) remain largely inaccessible to high-school physics teaching because of the advanced conceptual and mathematical prerequisites to master these topics. Integrating them into upper secondary physics teaching, outside specialized courses, poses a significant…

This study aimed to examine the mental health and social-emotional skills of individuals with mathematics difficulties (MD), reading difficulties (RD), and comorbid difficulties (MDRD) in China. Students with MD (n = 35), RD (n = 27), MDRD (n = 43), and typically-developing peers (TD, n = 167) completed the Children's Depression Inventory, the…

This study employed a multilevel, three-stage hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) approach to examine the factors influencing homework completion, time, and effort behaviors among middle and high school students. The student-level analysis encompassed a range of variables, including academic achievement, parental education, book ownership, age,…

Socioeconomic gaps in academic achievement have been widely documented. However, whether and to what extent these socioeconomic gaps extend to the domain of socio-emotional skills is still relatively underexplored. Furthermore, limited research has examined the potential mechanisms that might help explain this relationship. To address these gaps,…

This study examined how COVID-19 disrupted adolescent education, social interactions, and mental health by conducting exploratory cluster analysis to identify distinct profiles of technology use and physical activities, then comparing resulting clusters on demographics, social support, and mental health dimensions. Using the first wave of the…

Active learning approaches and critical thinking (CT) are crucial in modern higher education systems, for example within US and UK, particularly in the post-digital era of online platforms and ubiquitous Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools; however there remains a gap in our understanding of whether and how to teach CT effectively in…

This study investigates the longitudinal trajectories of children's peer play interactions and their predictors, including teacher variables (teacher efficacy, teacher-child interactions, classroom environment) and child individual variables (temperament, gender), and their effects on children's externalizing behaviors. The data were drawn from…

Context: Adolescence is the training ground for adult life. In a relatively short period, the adolescent will undergo a metamorphosis. During the high school years, the majority of adolescents move from persistent dependence to true independence, from logical thinking to abstract, complex and hypothetical thinking, from impulsivity to…

Psychological variables (e.g. L2 grit) remain a much under-investigated sub-category of individual differences compared with cognitive ones (e.g. aptitude). The present paper aims to gain a better understanding of the psychological effects of multilingualism by investigating tolerance of homosexuality (TH), which has received little scholarly…

Practice is essential to the acquisition and development of musical skills, requiring musicians' time, investment, application, motivation, metacognitive strategies, and ability to self-regulate. Research in children's music practice indicates the type, quality, and duration of practice, along with adult support, contributes to fluency in musical…

Purpose: This study's main objective is to determine the extent to which social capital and psychological capital can explain differences in career adaptability among higher education students. Design/methodology/approach: The study employed a quantitative approach, utilizing a survey research design. Data were gathered using an online…

This research investigates the role of reinforcement sensitivity theory (RST) in statistics education among two distinct samples of undergraduate psychology students. In Study 1, 318 students in a third-year statistics course completed self-report measures of RST, anxiety, attitudes, and self-efficacy concerning the study of statistics. In Study…