Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a learning difficulty specific to mathematics learning. The prevalence of DD may be equivalent to that of dyslexia, posing an important challenge for effective educational provision. Nevertheless, there is no agreed definition of DD and there are controversies surrounding cutoff decisions, specificity and gender…

Fostering lifelong learning (LLL) is a topic of high relevance for current educational policy. School lays the cornerstone for the key components of LLL, specifically persistent motivation to learn and self-regulated learning behavior. The present study investigated the impact of classroom instruction variables on concrete determinants for these…

The purpose of the present research was to advance the development of knowledge regarding social aspects of self-regulated learning (SRL). The study had the objective of exploring the occurrence of self and social aspects of regulation during collaborative activities within regular primary science classes. Through a multiple case study approach, 8…

The study investigated whether activation of inaccurate prior knowledge before study contributes to primary-school children's commission errors and overconfidence in these errors when learning new concepts. Findings indicate that inaccurate prior knowledge affects children's learning and calibration. The level of children's judgments of learning…

Comparing common mathematical errors to correct examples may facilitate learning, even for students with limited prior domain knowledge. We examined whether studying incorrect and correct examples was more effective than studying two correct examples across prior knowledge levels. Fourth- and fifth-grade students (N = 74) learned about decimal…

Developing fluency and flexibility in mathematics is a key goal of upper primary schooling, however, while fluency can be developed with practice, designing activities that support the development of flexibility is more difficult. Drawing on concepts of adaptive expertise, we developed a task for a multi-touch classroom, NumberNet, that aimed to…

Although students' affects and behaviors in achievement situations have been shown to be influenced by their previous learning experiences, less is known about how they relate to students' dispositional characteristics, such as temperament. This study examined to what extent children's temperament is related to their affective and behavioral…

The acquisition of addition facts was investigated in a practice study. Participants were 103 Grade 1 children who practiced simple addition problems with three different methods: (a) writing down the answer, (b) choosing between two alternative answers, and (c) filling in the second missing addend. On a test with simple addition problems,…

Immigrant students' school success is often hampered by limited second language (L2) proficiency, yet the effectiveness of different approaches to L2 support is unclear. Using a summer camp setting, we tested effects of (1) implicit support focusing on meaning of language by engaging students in language-intensive activities without drawing their…

There is conflicting evidence on whether collaborative group work leads to improved classroom relations, and if so how. A before and after design was used to measure the impact on work and play relations of a collaborative learning programme involving 575 students 9-12 years old in single- and mixed-age classes across urban and rural schools. Data…

Students (N=302) in Chinese elementary schools were assessed regarding their academic delay of gratification (ADOG) and reported the time they devoted to non-school study and playtime during an extended interval prior to taking a high-stakes final exam. Students high compared those low in ADOG were more likely to spend time studying and less time…

Based on current theories of multimedia learning, we propose a strategy for learning from animations. Two different experimental studies were conducted in order to evaluate the strategy. In the first study, 22 sixth graders learned from an animation without the strategy while 21 students were encouraged to make use of the proposed strategy during…

English spelling, as well as in many other languages, consists of three elements: morphology, etymology and phonology. Spelling instruction, however, focuses primarily on phonology and there is a dearth of intervention studies that examine the effect of explicitly teaching all three elements to children. We report two studies, which examined 5- to…

Is helping behaviour (i.e., solicited help and peer tutoring) during cooperative learning (CL) related to subsequent learning gains? And can teachers influence pupils' helping behaviour? One hundred and one 5th grade pupils from multiethnic schools, 10-12 years old, participated in the study. Forty-two pupils (31 immigrant pupils) worked in an…

This study investigated the relations between teachers' pedagogical beliefs and students' self-reported engagement in learning from texts with instructional pictures. Participants were the biology, geography, and German teachers of 46 classes (Grades 5-8) and their students. Teachers' instructional behaviors and students' engagement in learning…