Background: Undergraduate teaching assistants (UTAs) are associated with increased student performance and belongingness. Yet, when given a choice, not all students leverage UTA-facilitated opportunities equally. Objective: This study explores motivational and contextual factors that underlie individual differences in students' willingness to…

This study examines the relationships between university graduates' HEXACO traits and networking behavior for finding a job through job search network size. We integrate individual difference theory and social network theory to explain these links in two manners. We use individual difference theory to demonstrate that graduates with HEXACO…

Student development theory has been an important guide in practice; however, few theories focus on both the individual and the influence of the environment. Spencer's (1997) Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST) examines the individual, the environment, and the role of environmental feedback on self-perceptions, with a…

Spatial thinking is essential for nurturing spatially literate graduates in tertiary education. However, there is limited research on individual differences in cognitive processes and their impact on spatial problem solving in disciplinary contexts. This study aimed to investigate cognitive processes involved in spatial thinking in geography…

Anxiety-driven counterfactual thinking can be a slippery slope. Building on the premise that both positive and negative emotions can impact creativity, the present study examines how trait anxiety, optimism, and other mental health factors like therapy experience shape outputs in divergent thinking (DT) tasks. Using an online sample (N = 647), the…

On a daily basis, children make decisions about how to negotiate their physical environment. Sometimes they engage in physical tasks that involve risk, requiring them to judge the safety of how to negotiate the environment safely. Individual differences in children's age, sex, physical size, and personality may impact those decisions. We used…

Although we cannot see or touch time, across many cultures, we use spatial representations to think about this abstract concept. Spatial representations of time are thought to support temporal concepts that might otherwise be difficult to represent and reason about, such as the temporal component of episodic memory. One common form of spatially…

Students' experiences of physical education (PE) are considered important for lifelong attitudes towards physical activity. Sex-related differences and the individualised tempo in anthropometric growth because of biological maturation lead to secondary school students within chronological age-ordered classes possessing vast differences in…

The study examined Finnish elementary school pupils' academic peer assistance and its relation to their demographic backgrounds of gender and language, social networking with schoolmates, and orientation toward sociodigital participation. The participants (188 fifth graders) responded to a social networking questionnaire on schoolmate and academic…

Purpose: This meta-analysis study aimed to determine the optimal level of talker variability in training to maximize second-language speech learning. Method: We conducted a systematic search for studies comparing different levels of talker variability in nonnative speech training, published through July 2024. Two independent reviewers screened…

It is acknowledged the need for interventions to improve reading comprehension and its cognitive underpinnings, such as executive functions. The present study implemented a computerized cognitive training for enhancing reading comprehension in primary school children through EF activities embedded in text comprehension exercises. 263 third and…

Children begin to reason about gender and others' gender-typed preferences from early in life, yet not enough is known about whether their reasoning reflects only binary categorization or a more nuanced way understanding of variation in gender. Further, little is known about how children's conception of their own gender affects how they think…

This study examined the relationship between complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF), using longitudinal data. Conducted from the perspective of complex dynamic systems theory (CDST), this research adopted four CAF general measures to track the development of five Chinese undergraduates' English speech over a 15-week period. LOWESS graphs supported…

This study examined the influence of word problems and individual differences on student teachers' situational interest. There is extensive research on word problems, but few studies have assessed the impact on situational interest, particularly for self-generated word problems. Using a within-subject design (N = 256), we investigated whether…

Children's literature serves various purposes in early years such as addressing sensitive topics within classroom settings. Acknowledging these sensitive topics as an integral part of children's experiences and developmental needs, we advocate for the sustainability of their presence in educational environments by incorporating culturally…