The current study was part of a large project focusing on bilingual development in the preschool classroom context. Its aim was to theorize free play as a social and language learning activity that provides opportunities for young learners to move towards second language production. The role of free play for language development in general, and…

In this study, a model on the high school students' school burnout was tested, and the model's prediction of retained and promoted students was investigated. The school burnout model, in this sense, included the variables of grade point average (GPA), school burnout, perceived social support, stress, perfectionism, academic procrastination, and…

Girls tend to outperform boys in reading tests, while they usually lag behind boys in mathematics. However, the size of the gender gap varies to a great extent between countries. While the existing literature explains these differences as being mainly due to cultural factors, this paper explores whether this cross-country variation is related to…

The study aimed to examine and compare the science self-regulation skills of gifted and non-gifted students in this study. Survey design, one of the quantitative methods, was utilized in the research. The sample of the study consisted of 263 gifted students enrolled in science and art center and 482 non-gifted students located in the Eastern…

This study is focused on the threat of retention associated with test-based promotion in Grade 3. Through analyzing the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999 data, we found that schools having such a policy apparently increased math instructional time but not reading instructional time in Grade 3. On average, the…

The ability to synthesize and communicate complicated problems with confidence is paramount for success in STEM fields, but programs tend to overemphasize memorization. We conducted a preliminary study to determine if asking students to repeatedly link materials: (1) improved students' ability to build connections; and (2) increased students'…

This study adopts a creative methodology to investigate how cartoons can serve as visual representations of primary school children's understanding of bullying and compares how their understanding develops over time. The study was carried out in Northern Ireland where the "Addressing Bullying in Schools (Northern Ireland) Act 2016" will…

Probabilities tend to become an integral part of early childhood mathematics curricula. Research has shown that at the age of 4, children indicate basics of probabilistic reasoning and can engage with probabilistic tasks and uncertainty. The aim of this study is to examine whether methodological and design alterations influence children's…

The "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders'" (5th ed.) Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder is meant to capture the social elements of communication dysfunction in children who do not meet autism spectrum disorder criteria. It is unclear whether Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder captures these elements…

Nationwide, the percentage of four-year-olds enrolled in state-supported preschool programs has more than doubled since the early 2000s as states dramatically increased their investments in early childhood education. Florida's Voluntary Pre-kindergarten Program (VPK), which began in 2005, has been a national leader with respect to preschool…

The Autism impact measure (AIM) is a caregiver-reported questionnaire assessing autism symptom frequency and impact in children, previously shown to have good test-retest reliability, convergent validity and structural validity. This study extended previous work by exploring the AIM's ability to discriminate between 'known-groups' of children, and…

A fundamental question for human memory research relates to the role of attention during the binding of distinct components into an integrated representation. A number of important differences exist between the working memory and episodic memory literature in terms of methodological implementation and empirical outcomes. For instance, episodic…

In this study, we investigated one student as she engaged in the exploration of a graph theory problem, the Graceful Tree Conjecture. The study took place in a classroom in the Midwestern United States which contained eighteen students. We report on a descriptive case study of one student, Heidi, as she works her way through different classes of…

This paper evaluates the impact on dropout rates of a policy change in Mexico that eliminates grade retention for all first to third-grade students, causing a sharp reduction in repetition rates. I use a 12-year panel of schools to exploit such variation and estimate Difference-in-Difference models showing an average decrease in dropout rates of…

There are approximately 200,000 students in Houston Independent School District (HISD), and many of them are recent immigrants who have been in the United States for three years or less. In recent years, the number of immigrant students in the district has increased dramatically, with over 11,000 enrolled in each of the past seven years. In fact,…