The Home Learning Environment (HLE) focuses on everyday learning habits in families to support the development of children's early cognitive competencies. A growing number of studies have assessed the HLE by using different conceptual approaches and various assessment methods, often focusing on either the home literacy environment or the home…

Triangulation -- a combined use of different assessment methods or sources to evaluate psychological constructs -- is still a rarely used assessment approach in spite of its potential in overcoming inherent constraints of individual assessment methods. This paper uses field test data from a new OECD Study on Social and Emotional Skills to examine…

Beyond the traditional notions of intelligence and academic achievement, the successful development of noncognitive or "soft" skills (e.g., personality factors, motivation, creativity) among school-aged youth represents an important objective for any educational system. Such skills have been shown to be significantly predictive of…

This study is concerned with evaluating critical learning of 10-11 year-old students studying global citizenship through an online discussion environment. The evaluation is based on analysing the use of language as both a social reasoning tool and cognitive learning tool. Evaluation methods use: (1) content analysis of the online discussion…