Empirical studies have demonstrated that students who are taught in a group of students with higher average achievement benefit in terms of their achievement. However, there is also evidence showing that being surrounded by high-achieving students has a negative effect on students' academic self-concept, also known as the big-fish--little-pond…

Given that the Big-Fish-Little-Pond-Effect, the negative effect of school-average achievement on academic self-concept, is one of the most robust findings in educational psychology (Marsh, Seaton et al., 2007), this research extends the theoretical model, based on social comparison theory, to study relative year in school effects (e.g., being 1…

With the rise of large-scale academic assessment programs around the world, there is a need to better understand the factors predicting students' achievement in these assessment exercises. This investigation into national numeracy assessment drew on ecological and transactional conceptualizing involving student, student/home, and school factors.…

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…

Despite the increasing number of studies examining the correlates of interest and boredom, surprisingly little research has focused on within-person fluctuations in these emotions, making it difficult to describe their situational nature. To address this gap in the literature, this study conducted repeated measurements (12 times) on a sample of…

Data about processes and outcomes of preschool teacher education is scarce. This paper examines the opportunities to learn (OTL) of prospective preschool teachers (N = 1,851) at different types and stages of preschool teacher education and their relation to general pedagogical knowledge (GPK), mathematics pedagogical content knowledge (MPCK), and…

Children experience good and bad days in their performance. Although this phenomenon is well-known to teachers, parents, and students it has not been investigated empirically. We examined whether children's working memory performance varies systematically from day to day and to which extent fluctuations at faster timescales (i.e., occasions,…

Studies investigating the effects of emotional exhaustion among teachers have primarily focused on its relations with teacher-related outcome variables but little research has been done for examining its relations with student outcomes. Therefore, this study examines the relations between teachers' emotional exhaustion and educational outcomes…

Grouping similar students together within schools ("streaming") or classrooms ("tracking") based on past literacy skills (reported by parents), family socioeconomic status (SES) or reading attitudes might affect their reading achievement. Our multilevel analysis of the reading tests of 208,057 fourth-grade students across 40…

Some U.S. school districts are experimenting with single-sex schooling, hoping that it will yield better academic outcomes for students. Empirical research on the effects of single-sex schooling, however, has been equivocal, with various studies finding benefits, disadvantages, or no effect. Most of this research is marred because families…

The last decade has witnessed considerable interest in the investigation of the affective dimensions of learning and in the development of advanced learning technologies that automatically detect and respond to student affect. Identifying the affective states that students experience in technology-enhanced learning contexts is a fundamental…

Prior research has demonstrated that teachers' professional knowledge and motivation are strongly related to students' learning and motivation. Symptoms of teachers' stress and burnout (e.g., emotional exhaustion) are also thought to influence students' achievement, but no empirical study has tested this prediction. Using multilevel analyses and a…

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 present study examined the extent to which the relationships between student self-reported math grades and different types of student variables (standardized math test scores, interest and effort in math, parental education) are predicted by classroom composition and teachers' classroom management. Based on a representative sample of 31,038…

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…