Argument writing is challenging for elementary students. Previous experimental research has focused on scaffolding rhetorical goals, leaving content goals relatively unexplored. In a randomized experiment, 73 students in grades 5, 6, and 7 wrote persuasive texts about difficult-to-classify vertebrates. Each student received one of three sets of…

This article presents findings from an intervention across sixth and seventh grades to teach academic words to middle school students. The goals included investigating a progression of outcomes from word knowledge to comprehension and investigating the processes students use in establishing word meaning. Participants in Year 1 were two sixth-grade…

There has been a longstanding assumption that gifted, high-ability, or high-performing students prefer working alone; however, this may not be true in every case. The current study expanded on this assumption to reveal more nuanced learning preferences of these students. Sixty-nine high-performing and community-school students in Grades 5 and 6…

The aim of this explorative study was to find the factors limiting sixth-grade learners' outcomes in acquiring skills related to the transformative inquiry learning processes as well as to analyse the interrelations between inquiry skills in order to develop an optimal support system for designing Web-based inquiry learning environments. A…

This study investigated changes in elementary school students' (n = 140) situational interest as a function of achievement goal orientation profiles and task characteristics. The authors repeatedly measured situational interest during a simulated science learning task in 2 task conditions that differed in the concreteness of the task elements. The…

We take an innovative approach to estimating student mathematics learning in the sixth grade of three African countries. The study reinforces the notion that beyond the quality of the teaching process in classrooms, national contextual factors are important in understanding the contribution that schooling makes to student performance. Our approach…

The 7th International Conference on Education Data Mining held on July 4th-7th, 2014, at the Institute of Education, London, UK is the leading international forum for high-quality research that mines large data sets in order to answer educational research questions that shed light on the learning process. These data sets may come from the traces…