The objective of this article is to investigate the effects of preschool participation on learning achievement and to estimate the optimal duration of preschool participation needed for pupils to perform their best in mathematics at the Grade 6 level in Uganda. The sample consisted of 2649 Grade 6 pupils, attending 82 schools across two rural…

The authors examined the big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE) on academic self-concept (ASC) using different indicators of academic ability (i.e., achievement test, cognitive ability test, grades corrected for grading-on-a-curve effects, uncorrected grades). They investigated under what circumstances grades are suitable indicators of academic…

This study investigated the relationship between socio-economic status, school-level variables and mathematics achievement of sixth graders in Kenya and Zimbabwe. The study is based on secondary data collected by the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ III). SACMEQ employed cluster-sampling procedures…

This study analyses the effects of school resources on student mathematics achievement in Zimbabwe using a 3-Level Hierarchical Linear Model (HLM). The major findings of the research are that a teacher trained in the relevant subject, class size, having a highly qualified school head and having a generally high resource endowment at school level…

Bullying in ethnically diverse schools varies as a function of the ethnic composition and degree of diversity in schools. Although Canada is highly multicultural, few researchers have focused on the role of context on ethnic majority and minority youths' bullying involvement. In the present study, 11,649 European-Canadian/ethnic majority (77%) and…

This study investigated bullying victims' perceptions of their teachers' support and monitoring when controlling for level of mental health problems, peer relationships, gender, and grade level. Given the nested structure of the data, multilevel analyses were employed to examine these associations. The quality of classroom interaction is highly…

This exploratory study investigated potential sources of setting accommodation resulting in differential item functioning (DIF) on math and reading assessments for examinees with varied learning characteristics. The examinees were those who participated in large-scale assessments and were tested in either standardized or accommodated testing…

The bulk of scholarship on multicultural education continues to focus exclusively on U.S. education. Previous studies published in this field also have focused largely on topics that are considered relevant for the United States, whereas little attention has been paid to topics that are less problematized in the United States. In this mixed-method…

Little is known about factors other than students' abilities and background variables that shape teachers' achievement expectations. This study was aimed at investigating the role of teachers' perceptions of students attributes (working habits, popularity, self-confidence, student--teacher relationships, and classroom behavior) in shaping…

Changes in the demands posed by increasingly complex workplaces in the 21st century have raised the importance of nonroutine skills such as complex problem solving (CPS). However, little is known about the antecedents and outcomes of CPS, especially with regard to malleable external factors such as classroom climate. To investigate the relations…

The purpose of this study is to investigate student- and school-level factors that help to explain the difference in the nature of science (NOS) views. Overall, the design of this study is correlational. The sample consisted of 3062 students enrolled in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades of elementary schools in Turkey. A hierarchical linear…

The current study bridges research on peer relational and physical victimization with research on ethnic victimization and situates this research in the context of ethnic diversity. Specifically, the authors investigate how ethnic, relational, and physical victimization relate to concurrent levels of depression/anxiety and physical aggression and…

Observation competence plays a fundamental role in outdoor scientific investigation. The computerized concept mapping technique as a Mindtool has shown the potential for enhancing meaningful learning in science education. The purposes of the present study are to develop a concept map integrated mobile learning design for ecology observation and to…

Alternatives to vertical scales are compared for measuring longitudinal academic growth and for producing school-level growth measures. The alternatives examined were empirical cross-grade regression, ordinary least squares and logistic regression, and multilevel models. The student data used for the comparisons were Arabic Grades 4 to 10 in…