One of the ways in which schools try to improve students' motivation is through making learning meaningful for students. The concept of meaningful learning, however, has been defined in various ways in the literature. This small-scale in-depth study focused on meaningful learning in mathematics in upper-primary education. We investigated what…

The current study replicated an earlier investigation by Bouwer and van der Veen (2023) where 10 Grade 5 and 6 classrooms in the Netherlands (210 students) were randomly assigned to a treatment or control condition, with treatment students evidencing improvements in the quality of their essays after practice writing argumentative essays, reading…

The balance model is often used for teaching linear equation solving. Little research has investigated the influence of various representations of this model on students' learning outcomes. In this quasi-experimental study, we examined the effects of two learning environments with balance models on primary school students' reasoning related to…

In the Netherlands, the quality of the reading curriculum is currently under debate because of disappointing results on national and international assessments of students' reading skills and motivation. In a mixed-method study, we analyzed the content of Dutch textbooks for reading comprehension instruction (i.e., the implemented curriculum) and…

In this study, we investigated which teacher characteristics influence student proficiency development regarding fractions in Grade 5 of Dutch primary education. At least three domains of research (i.e. perspectives) on effective teaching can be distinguished: studies focusing on teachers' background characteristics, on their knowledge and…

The present study examined teachers' domain-specific self-efficacy (TSE) in relation to individual students with a variety of social-emotional behaviors in class. Using a sample of 526 third- to sixth-grade students and 69 teachers, multilevel modeling was conducted to examine students' externalizing, internalizing, and prosocial behaviors as…

Drill-and-practice mathematics software offers teachers a relatively simple way to use technology in the classroom. One of the reasons to use the software may be that it motivates children, working on the computer being more "fun" than doing regular school work. However, students' own perceptions of such software are seldom studied. This…

The present study aims to contribute to the understanding of the effects of music education, in particular music composition as a classroom activity for fifth- and sixth-graders. The intervention (experimental condition) focused on a three-step-model for music composition, based on the Cultural Historical Activity Theory of education, and has been…

Teachers in primary education experience difficulties in teaching word problem solving in their mathematics classes. However, during controlled experiments with a metacognitive computer programme, students' problem-solving skills improved. Also without the supervision of researchers, metacognitive computer programmes can be beneficial in a natural…

Schools frequently increase the instructional time to improve primary school children's math and reading skills. There is, however, little evidence that math and reading skills are effectively improved by these instruction-time increases. This study evaluates "Playing for Success" (PfS), an extended school day program for underachieving…

In this study, we compared two instruction methods on spelling performance: a rewriting instruction in which children repeatedly rewrote words and an ambiguous property instruction in which children deliberately practiced on a difficult word aspect. Moreover, we examined whether the testing effect applies to spelling performance. One hundred…

With regard to transfer, is it better to provide pupils with ready-made representations or is it more effective to scaffold pupils' thinking in the process of generating their own representations with the help of peers and under the guidance of a teacher in a process of guided co-construction? The sample comprises 10 classes and 239 Grade 5…

Spelling pronunciations are hypothesized to be helpful in building up relatively stable phonologically underpinned orthographic representations, particularly for learning words with irregular phoneme-grapheme correspondences. In a four-week computer-based training, the efficacy of spelling pronunciations and previewing the spelling patterns on…