The performance of standardized tests is an ongoing matter of concern for childhood researchers. Standardized tests are often described as neglecting the ethical complexities of doing research with young children. However, this critique is primarily presented in general terms, and does not attend to the locality and specificity of particular test…

Published studies of intervention effects probably report effect sizes that are larger than the true effect size. There are probably many reasons for this, but one can be thought of as a "winner's curse." In this essay, I discuss evidence from two recent studies that highlight how evidence clearinghouses might inadvertently expose…

Two of the greatest Dutch educationalists of the twentieth century, Philipp Abraham Kohnstamm (1875-1951) and Martinus Jan Langeveld (1905-1989), believed that education meant, above all, the formation of a conscience. They developed their ideas in a time full of developments within Europe: the rise of fascism, two world wars, and pioneering…

This article evaluates the predictions of an algorithmic-level distributed associative memory model as it introduces, propagates, and resolves ambiguity, and compares it to the predictions of computational-level parallel parsing models in which ambiguous analyses are accounted separately in discrete distributions. By superposing activation…

Mindfulness-based programs have become popular, empirically supported treatment modalities for increasing positive psychological outcomes for children and adolescents, with an overall effect size of 0.4. We argue for implementing community-based participatory research (CBPR) methodology to investigate the specific effects of mindfulness-based…

In response to recent trends in the field of mathematics education, real-world contexts are frequently found in curricula and classrooms across the world. Numerous scholars contend that, in addition to making instruction more engaging and relevant, rich, imaginable contexts can provide a semantic grounding that helps students deeply understand…

The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual model of contextual influences on musical engagement in a person's life. I developed this domain-specific conceptual model based on Bronfenbrenner's (2001) bioecological theory of human development. The model accounts for multiple, interacting contexts that may influence an adolescent's musical…

Research on Self-regulated Learning (SRL) increasingly emphasises contextual factors, highlighting the contingent, dynamic and temporal nature of self-regulation. However, the experiential aspect of how learners actually perceive and engage with SRL still remains relatively unexplored. While SRL emphasises active learner involvement in learning,…

We study the returns to experience in teaching, estimated using supervisor ratings from classroom observations. We describe the assumptions required to interpret changes in observation ratings over time as the causal effect of experience on performance. We compare two difference-in-differences strategies: the two-way fixed effects estimator common…

In this article, I advocate for an enriched view of children's linguistic input, with the aim of building sustainable and tangible links between theoretical models of language development and families' everyday experiences. Children's language experiences constrain theoretical models in ways that may illuminate universal learning biases. However,…

The production and use of explicit models of mathematics are important elements of research in Didactics of Mathematics. In this paper, we present and compare two different European approaches to didactical modelling. The first, centred around the notion of basic idea (Grundvorstellung), arose in German-speaking countries as a development within…

Purpose: In recent years, the importance of embedding children's racial, cultural, and ability identities has received greater attention in the field of speech-language therapy. Picture books have become one common way of embedding children's identities in therapy sessions. Picture books are a powerful tool for sharing communities' identities,…

Friedrich Froebel is often positioned in contemporary landscapes of early childhood education as a 'pioneer', strongly associated with an emphasis on self-directed activity and learning through nature. While Froebel's philosophy has clearly had an impact on how we think about young children today, in this article we argue that we need to…

Promoting equity is a policy challenge facing education systems throughout the world, not least in the United Kingdom where there are continuing concerns about the progress of learners from disadvantaged backgrounds. This paper draws on the experience of its author within a series of large-scale government-funded improvement initiatives to address…

Predictive analytics methods in education are seeing widespread use and are producing increasingly accurate predictions of students' outcomes. With the increased use of predictive analytics comes increasing concern about fairness for specific subgroups of the population. One approach that has been proposed to increase fairness is using demographic…