As handheld devices, such as tablets, become a common tool in schools, a critical and urgent question for the research community is to assess their potential impact on educational outcomes. Previous meta-analytic research has evidenced the "screen inferiority effect": Readers tend to understand texts slightly worse when reading on-screen…

It is well established that children's reading comprehension is driven, at least in part, by their awareness of morphemes, or the smallest units of meaning in language. The question of how it does so is largely open; this mechanistic knowledge would specify theories of reading comprehension and guide effective classroom instruction. We report here…

Stability and change in students' achievement goals (AGs) are of great relevance for educational research and practice. In two separate meta-analyses, we investigated the rank-order stability (93 studies, 569 effect sizes, 54,736 students), as well as the mean-level change (157 studies, 1,170 effect sizes, 81,464 students) in AGs throughout…

Creativity is highly valued in both education and the workforce, but assessing and developing creativity can be difficult without psychometrically robust and affordable tools. The open-ended nature of creativity assessments has made them difficult to score, expensive, often imprecise, and therefore impractical for school- or district-wide use. To…

This mixed-methods study explores the relationship between early elementary students' domain-specific vocabulary knowledge and their ability to comprehend grade-level reading passages on unfamiliar science topics. Specifically, this study used (a) structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the extent to which students' networks of…

The purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis is twofold: (a) to understand how the three key student engagement dimensions (i.e., affective, behavioral, and cognitive) have been conceptualized, operationalized, and measured by researchers in the field and (b) to examine the extent to which the construct, its dimensions, and subtypes are…

Visual-verbal paired-associate learning (PAL) is thought to be related to reading acquisition and, more specifically, to word reading skills. To date, the uniqueness and strength of this relationship has remained unclear because most studies have been conducted in opaque orthographies such as English, and few studies have controlled for all of the…

This study aims to classify subtypes of mathematics disability (MD) using a novel classification method, cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs), and examine whether domain-general skills, namely, linguistic, working memory, and spatial skills, were related to the identification of the subtypes. Participants were 454 children (246 boys; age: M ± SD =…

In recent studies, the existence and relevance of achievement composition effects on students' individual achievement have been called into question because of the methodological challenges arising in multilevel analyses. Our study examined how class-average achievement is related to students' achievement development across one school year. We…

Pre-kindergarten (Pre-K) improves the school readiness of all children, but less is known about whether associations between enrollment in Pre-K and different indicators of social-emotional and executive functioning (EF) skills are sustained as children move into and across elementary school. The current study examines associations between…

The emotion of boredom has sparked considerable interest in research on teaching and learning, but boredom during tests and exams has not yet been examined. Based on the control-value theory of achievement emotions, we hypothesized that students may experience significant levels of boredom during testing ("test boredom"; Hypothesis 1)…

There is a lack of research examining how students' emotion regulation is linked to their well-being at school. To address this gap in the current literature, we examined reciprocal relations between two important emotion regulation strategies (cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression) and school-related well-being over 12 months across 2…

This study aimed to examine the unique longitudinal role of theory of mind (ToM) on reading comprehension among primary school children, while controlling for other influencing factors. It also examined how this impact varies by grade, text genre, and processing level. A sample of 430 Chinese children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 was observed over a…

Based on 1,364 children across Grades 1, 3, and 5, the present study explored the mutualism of (externalizing and internalizing) behavioral problems and language, and whether social skills explained such mutualism. The random intercept cross-lagged panel models were conducted to control for between-person level variance and to explore mutualism of…

Variability in oral reading fluency (ORF), an indicator of foundational reading skills, has been linked to characteristics of texts. Such "text-based variability" in ORF has been traditionally attributed to text complexity, but substantial text-based variability has still been observed after accounting for text complexity. We consider…