A deeper understanding of the pre-primary teacher's profession is made possible by the use of pictures in pedagogical research, i.e. the hermeneutic analysis of symbols visually representing this profession. The study seeks comprehension through quantification of the thematic motifs in the students' pictures (n = 132) as well as a detailed…

The purpose of this study is to generate non-verbal items for a visual reasoning test using templated-based automatic item generation (AIG). The fundamental research method involved following the three stages of template-based AIG. An item from the 2016 4th-grade entrance exam of the Science and Art Center (known as BILSEM) was chosen as the…

The cognate advantage in bilingual children varies in strength across groups and individuals, in particular on receptive measures (e.g. picture-identification). This variation may be due to children's developing ability to benefit from cognates in such tasks, yet longitudinal studies of this phenomenon, especially with older children, are rare.…

This study explores the affective responses and beliefs school-aged heritage-language learners (HLLs) hold regarding learning their two languages. Sixty-three HLLs in grades 3 and 4 were presented with pictorial scenarios involving activities across five language and literacy domains in their HL and second language (English). Children were asked…

It is well established that girls and boys perform differently in traditional examinations in most countries. This study looks at a sample of 754 school students in Kuwait (aged about 13) and explores how boys and girls differ in the performance in a range of tests related to learner characteristics. The fundamental question is how boys and girls…

A small sample of 20 hearing students and 20 students who are deaf and hard-of-hearing participated in this study, which compared their performances on two measures of metacognition. The first measure required participants to visually analyse real-life pictures and then to choose a response from four options (voiced or signed) indicating which was…