Early childhood is characterized by rapid increases in both motor skills and executive function skills. Rather than simply codeveloping, the development of motor and executive function skills may be linked causally. In this article, we introduce corticomuscular coherence as a paradigm for psychologists interested in testing mechanistic questions…

Knowledge tracing (KT) for evaluating students' knowledge is an essential task in personalized education. More and more researchers have devoted themselves to solving KT tasks, e.g., deep knowledge tracing (DKT), which can capture more sophisticated representations of student knowledge. Nonetheless, these techniques ignore the reconstruction of…

Blaming teachers and schools for perceived or actual educational failures are popular tropes for justifying educational reforms in the United States. Critical educational research implicates neoliberalism in the normalized positioning of teachers and schools as the key suspects in educational failures. This article critiques the etiology of…

This essay starts with the classical assertion of Niklas Luhmann that there exist no pedagogic technologies, but takes up parts of his conceptual understanding of technology to describe and understand mass schooling in the nineteenth century. It is argued that using his terminology and focusing on "technologies of schooling" brings into…

Interventions targeting absence from school justify themselves with the claim that absence causes negative effects or prevents good effects. I argue that these are empty claims. I propose that absence as a cause makes sense in two ways: (1) in the context of prevention, if we take into consideration our expectations of what would have taken place,…

How causation is approached has, for some time now, been a central debate within the archives of educational research. Despite rich discussion in broader literature, the influence of what has been described as the 'methodology wars' has rarely featured within the field(s) of outdoor and environmental education (OEE). This paper explores causation…

Many studies suggest a relationship between education and political participation, but only some address causality. We add to this by re-examining the German case. For identification, we exploit an exogenous increase in compulsory schooling, and use data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). The data enable analyses that do not rely…

The central importance of evolution to all biological sciences is recognised by many authors. Despite this scientific consensus, the theory of evolution is commonly presented as one discrete topic among many in the biology curriculum. Possible reasons for this scenario include discomfort with the content, ideological opposition and teachers'…

The internal validity of observational study is often subject to debate. In this study, we define the counterfactuals as the unobserved sample and intend to quantify its relationship with the null hypothesis statistical testing (NHST). We propose the probability of a robust inference for internal validity, that is, the PIV, as a robustness index…

The relationship between students' subject-specific academic self-concept and their academic achievement is one of the most widely researched topics in educational psychology. A large proportion of this research has considered cross-lagged panel models (CLPMs), oftentimes synonymously referred to as reciprocal effects models (REMs), as the gold…

Although John Paul II published "Pastores dabo vobis" specifically for the formation of seminarians for Catholic priesthood, it nonetheless contains much wisdom regarding the formation of any young person on the cusp of full adulthood. John Paul outlines a framework of personal formation according to its human, spiritual, intellectual,…

Conventional advice discourages controlling for postoutcome variables in regression analysis. By contrast, we show that controlling for commonly available postoutcome (i.e., future) values of the treatment variable can help detect, reduce, and even remove omitted variable bias (unobserved confounding). The premise is that the same unobserved…

Attribution theory is concerned with why outcomes occur such as "Why did I fail the exam?" or "Why are they picking on me?" (Weiner, 1986, 2018; see Graham, 2020 for a review). Although this article focuses on achievement, attributions are relevant to the social as well as the achievement domain. Both questions concern failure…

This paper seeks to outline and describe the features of Ewe causative verbs and how they encode causative events. It explores the sub-lexical analysis of verbs' meanings since they form the basis of the classification of causal relations that allow us to explore the different imports between (sub-)events and how these events are structured, and…

Children of teen mothers have worse academic, labor market, and behavioral outcomes in the United States, but it is not clear whether these poor outcomes are caused by having a young mother or driven by selection into teen motherhood. Understanding the reasoning behind poor child outcomes is important for designing effective policies to improve…