Lexical inference refers to the ability to make informed guesses about the meaning of an unknown word. This inferencing ability is affected by learner-related (i.e., morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge) and language-related (i.e., word semantic transparency) factors. Previous studies have shown that these factors play independent…

Self-rated mental effort has been and continues to be the most widely used measure of cognitive load. This single-item measure is often used as a predictor variable in linear models for predicting performance or some other response variable. While an advantage of linear models is that they are fairly easy to understand, they fall short when the…

College sense of belonging and well-being constitute critical components of college student adjustment and success. Previous studies have generally measured these outcomes at one (or sometimes two) points in time, which prevents researchers from understanding the ongoing adjustment process as well as the dynamic interplay between college…

We investigated how and when French children in Grades 1-5 acquire orthographic representations for silent letters and double consonants. Linear mixed-effects modeling analyses on the spelling accuracy scores obtained for 2,519 French words were used to test our predictions. As predicted, the presence of a silent letter or double consonant had a…

In this study, we applied an evolutionary perspective to analyze the relationship between aggressiveness, academic performance, and sociality in a population of 528 adolescents of both sexes. In men, we expect physical aggression (PA) and sociality to be negative predictors of academic performance. However, in women, PA would be a negative…

Results from a genome-wide association study (GWAS) can be used to generate a polygenic score (PGS), an individual-level measure summarizing identified genetic influence on a trait dispersed across the genome. For complex, behavioral traits, the association between an individual's PGS and their phenotype may contain bias (from geographic,…

When estimating an average treatment effect with observational data, it's possible to get an unbiased estimate of the causal effect if all confounding variables are observed and reliably measured. In education, confounding variables are often latent constructs. Covariate selection methods used in causal inference applications assume that all…

The purpose of this study was to determine predictive factors that influenced persistence of African American women in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. An integrated model of persistence in STEM education was created from Tinto's (1975) model of student attrition and Bandura's (1986) social…

Over the past decade, low graduation and retention rates have plagued higher education institutions. To help students graduate on time and achieve optimal learning outcomes, many institutions provide advising services supported by educational technologies. Accurate grade prediction is an integral part of these services such as degree planning…

Math anxiety -- negative feelings towards math -- is hypothesized to be associated with the avoidance of math-related activities such as taking math courses and pursuing STEM careers. Surprisingly, however, there is little experimental evidence for the math anxiety- avoidance link. Such evidence is important for formulating how to break this…

The goal of this paper is to advance the understanding of the way university educators currently adopt open educational practices (OEP) by analyzing the relation between the use of open educational resources (OER) and the implementation of open teaching practices. The results are based on data collected through an online survey among 724…

Research has indicated the importance of vocabulary knowledge and background knowledge in second/foreign language (L2) listening comprehension. However, previous studies treated these two factors separately, and no study has examined the simultaneous contribution of these two factors to L2 listening comprehension. Therefore, the aim of this study…

Orthographic knowledge is predicted to be central in the process of children's reading development. We examined both the temporal order between orthographic knowledge and each of word reading and word spelling--effectively, which predicts which by including autoregressive controls--and cross-linguistic transfer between English and French for our…

Purpose: Various recent studies are perplexed with the situation if subjective measures such as perceptions of learning reflect knowledge gains and whether they can be used as a surrogate for evidence of actual learning in an online learning environment. Due to a rising trend in current research studies interpreting perceptions of learning…

Loneliness is a common concern among university students, as these individuals experience many of the risk factors associated with loneliness. This experience of loneliness tends to lead to numerous consequences such as negative self-evaluations, anxiety, and depression, which in turn lead to impaired concentration and a decline in academic…