Background: Peers constitute an important developmental context for adolescent academic behaviour providing support and resources to either promote or discourage attitudes and behaviours that contribute to school success. When looking for academic help, students may prefer specific partners based on their social goals regarding academic…

Global and national education agendas are concerned with improving the quality and equality of learning outcomes. School systems involuntarily continue to produce new and perpetuate existing inequities and injustices, particularly for minority students. While previous research has highlighted the potential causes and effects of educational…

This study used a cluster randomized controlled trial to investigate the effectiveness of two approaches to increasing middle school students' science learning when using an inquiry-based science curriculum. Eighty-nine schools, with 253 teachers and 20,591 students, were randomly assigned into one of three conditions: (a) a treatment condition in…

Executive functions (EF) and task persistence are key factors in academic development. However, EF and persistence have rarely been examined together, and it remains unclear whether these two constructs are independently related to intellectual development. The present study addressed this gap by examining whether EF and persistence in…

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted education worldwide as educational systems made the decision to close schools to contain the spread of the virus. The duration of school closures varied greatly internationally. In this study, we use representative trend data from more than 300,000 students in 29 countries to examine whether the cross-country…

A recent report from the Progressive Policy Institute examines the impact of charter schools on the achievement of students who remain enrolled in traditional district schools. It is centered around a graph that depicts a strong positive relationship between the percentage of students enrolled in charter schools and decreases in the achievement…

Procrastination in academic contexts is thought to have a negative effect on students' learning and performance. This research sought to provide a comprehensive multi-method and multimodal validation of a self-report measure of procrastination, revealing its intricate associations with behavioral indicators of procrastination, engagement, and…

The student population throughout the United States has shifted; thus, it is essential to consider ways to address the needs of culturally, linguistically diverse (CLD) students. Prior research found that culturally relevant teaching (CRT) improves academic performance. However, little quantitative research examines the relationship between CRT…

The current analysis aims to research the impact of ICT usage on students' achievement in the 2018 PISA assessment, specifically achievement in mathematics, science and reading scales. In this assessment, a total of 5,058 randomly selected students from 224 schools across Kosovo took part in the study. In addition, to the subscales assessing…

Bandura's influential theory has been used to argue that teachers with high self-efficacy will be more effective at increasing pupil achievement--and a voluminous empirical literature has repeatedly documented associations consistent with this claim. However, few studies have considered whether these correlations reflect an underlying causal…

We examine whether and how teachers' major fields in college affect students' achievement, exploiting within-student variation across subfields in natural science (i.e. physics, chemistry, biology, and Earth science). Using middle-school students' data from the TIMSS and controlling for student-teacher fixed effects, we find that teachers improve…

Inequities have existed in formal public education since its inception in the United States. The educational experiences and outcomes for Black students have historically lagged behind their non-Hispanic, and White peers. This dissertation uses data from The Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey for the Kindergarten Class of 2011 (ECLS-K: 2011) to…

In Lebanon, science is taught in an international language (French or English) based on a language-in-education policy rooted in Lebanon's colonial history. Given the intersection among social/socioeconomic class, educational equity, and science performance, learning science in a language other than one's own raises concerns around…

Following Dynamic Systems Theory (Thelen & Smith, 1994) and Sociocultural Theory (Vygotsky, 1978), this study compared the developmental paths of low and high-achieving EFL individuals and dyads, considering production features of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). The participants included six MA students majoring in Industrial Design…

Many are concerned about the large decline in K-12 student achievement since 2019. And rightly so, given what it signals about student learning and later life outcomes. Less noted is the pre-pandemic sustained decline in student achievement growth that followed 30 years of increases. We examine the nature of achievement decline as measured by…