Based upon the ecological perspective and the social cognitive theory, this study examined the role of reading self-efficacy in the associations of contextual factors with reading achievement by establishing an educational ecology of reading. The model included student factors, student/home factors, student/school factors, and school factors of…

This paper focuses on children with a migration background and conceptualises their migration experience as adversity. The paper adapts the resilience framework to understand how immigrant children can overcome adversity. The paper discusses policy models that can be derived from adopting a resilience approach to the measurement of immigrant…

This study examined how student reports of bullying were related to different dimensions of school climate, at both the school and the student levels, using a contextual effects model in a two-level multilevel modeling framework. Participants included 48,874 secondary students (grades 8 to 12; 24,244 girls) from 76 schools in Western Canada.…

Purpose: We describe the natural auditory environment of people with cochlear implants (CIs), how it changes across the life span, and how it varies between individuals. Method: We performed a retrospective cross-sectional analysis of Cochlear Nucleus 6 CI sound-processor data logs. The logs were obtained from 1,501 people with CIs (ages 0-96…

This review explores predictors and consequences of students' growth goals and growth mindset in school with particular emphasis on how correlational statistical methods can be applied to illuminate key issues and implications. Study 1 used cross-sectional data and employed structural equation modelling (SEM) to investigate the role of growth…

Most educational climate research is conducted among (day school) students who spend the bulk of their young lives outside of school, potentially limiting the amount of climate variance that can be captured. Boarding school students, on the other hand, spend much of their lives at school and thus offer a potentially unique perspective on…

Based on a one-year longitudinal experimental study with 3,782 kindergarten school children across 15 countries, this article examines the association between prayer and happiness. Results show that the post-test scores on the faces scale were higher for the participant group who had taken the prayer lessons vis-à-vis the comparison group.…

The Objective Structured Clinical Exam (OSCE) is a widely used method of assessment in medical education. Rater cognition has become an important area of inquiry in the medical education assessment literature generally, and in the OSCE literature specifically, because of concerns about potential compromises of validity. In this study, a novel…

Empirical studies of personality traits in creative writers have demonstrated mixed findings, perhaps due to issues of sampling, measurement, and the reporting of statistical information. The goal of this study is to quantify the personality structure of aspiring creative writers according to a modern hierarchal model of trait personality. A…

The current study applied the person-fit statistic, l[subscript z], to data from a Canadian provincial achievement test to explore the usefulness of conducting person-fit analysis on large-scale assessments. Item parameter estimates were compared before and after the misfitting student responses, as identified by l[subscript z], were removed. The…

Using Hierarchical Linear Modelling (HLM), this study aimed to identify factors such as ESL/ELL/EAL status that would predict students' reading performance in an English language arts exam taken across Canada. Using data from the 2007 administration of the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program (PCAP) along with the accompanying surveys for students and…

This mixed methods sequential explanatory study utilized the Multi-factor Leadership Questionnaire, responses to open-ended questions, and in-depth interviews to identify transformational leadership qualities that were present among principals in Alberta, Canada. The first quantitative phase consisted of a random sample of 135 schools (with…

This study investigates whether a common set of student attitudes and behavioral tendencies can account for academic achievement across different, especially high-performing, countries via analysis of the PISA 2009 international data set. The 13 countries examined are 5 of the top-performing Eastern countries/systems, namely Shanghai China, South…

This study, employing hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), sought to investigate the student-level and school-level factors associated with the science achievement of immigrant and non-immigrant students among a national sample of 22,646 students from 896 schools in Canada. While student background characteristics such as home language, family…

This paper explores the relative importance of social factors and health measures in predicting educational achievement in early and late adolescence using population-based administrative data. The sample was made up of 41,943 children born in Manitoba, Canada between 1982 and 1989 and remaining in the province until age 18. Multilevel modeling…