Teachers frequently use humour, but it is unclear how this affects the academic experiences and psychosocial development of students. There is sparsity in the literature regarding the impact of teachers' humour on adolescent students. Teachers and the use of humour in the classroom have the potential to foster healthy development of social and…

This paper describes a human-centered design approach to investigate unmet adolescent sexual health wants and needs among youth of color in low-income and rural communities in Texas, North Carolina, and Connecticut (n = 149). The approach involved gathering qualitative data through in-depth interviews and other human-centered design activities…

An issue devoted to foundational skills and adolescents might center the cognitive skills and practices most needed to accelerate learning. While an understanding of these--whether multisyllabic decoding, fostering comprehension through discussion, or argumentative writing--is important, in this article, we advocate for the importance of attending…

Technology in the classroom can facilitate learning, but little is known about how the motivational climate set by teachers shapes its impacts on students. Informed by self-determination theory, the current study explored technology use in English language classrooms to understand how autonomy-supportive and structured teaching styles influenced…

It is critical to promote solid and long-lasting learning techniques in children and adolescents worldwide, including the most underprivileged ones, to improve various aspects of life. Consequentially, research should identify learning techniques that are beneficial for school-age children and that could be easy and inexpensive to apply in…

This discussion introduces a heuristic to guide writing instruction with adolescents and young adults. Our framework, called "Open World Writing," consists of six writing territories (vision, material, design, voice, flow, polish) that provide focus and clarity for writing and educators working across academic and creative writing…

Teacher-student interactions are considered to influence student engagement. As such, building on the teaching through interaction framework, this study presents an investigation of specific features of teacher-student interactions (regard for adolescent perspectives, productivity, and instructional learning formats) and their association with…

We investigated what students learnt about biodiversity, a broad and multi-dimensional concept, challenging to understand, following a visit to a nature reserve. Acknowledging the individual nature of informal learning, we explore Personal Meaning Maps (PMMs) coupled with semi-structured interviews to investigate learning among 13 scouts aged…

Trauma-informed practices in school settings aim to help students understand how past traumas may trigger memories of hurt and neglect, how they can distinguish these earlier memories from the present, so that they can form themselves into healthy, functioning adults. Although approaches adopted thus far may remedy students' cognitive, emotional,…

The present investigation examines the impact of Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL) on the enhancement of EFL learners' idiom learning through "WhatsApp" during the COVID-19 pandemic. Three complete classes with 60 intermediate female learners (20 per class) were selected and randomly assigned into two experimental and one control…

In this dissertation I report findings from two studies of the literacy abilities of children with Williams syndrome (WS), a genetic disorder associated with intellectual disability. I had two overarching goals: 1) evaluate the applicability of theories of reading and spelling acquisition developed based on typically developing children to…

Scholars have increasingly argued that we need to attend to adolescents' race, ethnicity, and culture in after-school activities to ensure positive effects. Still, little is known about adolescents' perceptions of culturally responsive practices in after-school activities (i. e., the use of diverse teaching practices, cultural engagement, and…

Design-Based Learning (DBL) is a pedagogical approach where learning is situated in the context of design activities that are typically carried out in groups. During collaborative design inquiry, reflection is of vital importance for learning from design experience. The paper presents a research-through-design study with the intention to generate…

Cinema has become indispensable to the world since the Lumiere Brothers shot the first film in the history of cinema, "Arrival of a Train." While it promised a captivating experience for audiences, those in power sought ways to exploit cinema and found it relatively easy to do so. Even Hitler sought refuge in cinema during the 1936…

This systematic review synthesized the literature on vocabulary interventions designed for the students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A total of 31 articles (20 single case research design studies and 11 group design studies) met the inclusion criteria. The reviewed studies included 440 participants with ASD ages 3 to 14. In general,…