Literacy and Basic Skills (LBS) programs in many Ontario colleges offer adult learners who have low literacy and basic skills with opportunities to improve their employment skills as well as results on prerequisite courses for entrance into post-secondary education. LBS students encounter many challenges and require extra interpersonal…

Research has identified various domain-general and domain-specific cognitive abilities as predictors of children's individual differences in mathematics achievement. However, research into the predictors of children's individual growth rates, namely between-person differences in within-person change in mathematics achievement is scarce. We…

High school course grades are a primary source of information about students' academic readiness, yet they are often viewed as inconsistent measures of student achievement-- influenced by idiosyncratic practices across schools and teachers, systematic differences in course content and structure, compositional effects of peers, and student…

Individual differences in executive function (EF) are well established to be related to mathematics achievement, yet the mechanisms by which this occurs are not well understood. Comparing representations (problems, solutions, concepts) is central to mathematical thinking, and relational reasoning is known to rely upon EF resources. The current…

Studies with U.S. secondary second language (L2) learners have revealed individual differences (IDs) in first language (L1) skills and L2 aptitude and shown that these IDs are related to L2 achievement and proficiency. In this study, U.S. students were administered measures of L1 achievement, L1 cognitive processing, and L2 aptitude; followed…

Easy and rapid access to the Internet, the affordances of Web 2.0 tools and technological advances, such as smartphone applications, have rendered informal contact with English an undisputed reality. This out-of-class contact without the primary or conscious objective of language learning has been the focus of recent research into the field of…

This paper describes the academic consultation services offered to students with disabilities (SWD) at a small university. Each SWD is entitled to meet regularly with an academic consultant. The consultants are trained in offering a variety of services, including organization/time management, note-taking/reading comprehension strategies, goal…

This article synthesizes foundational knowledge from multiple scientific disciplines regarding how humans develop in context. Major constructs that define human development are integrated into a developmental system framework, this includes--epigenetics, neural malleability and plasticity, integrated complex skill development and learning, human…

Research has indicated age-related improvements in relational binding, an important process of episodic memory, across development. However, little research has focused on individual differences in relational binding and factors contributing to this variation. Although differences may arise from various sources, early caregiving has been shown to…

Children struggle with the resolution of pronouns during reading, but little is known about the sources of their difficulties. We conducted a longitudinal eye tracking experiment with 70 children in the final years of primary school. The children read sentences with a contextual resolution preference in which gender was either an informative…

This research investigates the variables influencing willingness to communicate (WTC) in English as a foreign language (EFL) context in Taiwan. A hypothesized EFL WTC model with six layers focusing on factors related to individual differences was proposed and the EFL WTC model was reinterpreted as a serial mediation model. Ten latent variables,…

Research on personality in the educational context has primarily focused on quantitative approaches, so this study used a mixed methods approach to capture the boarder aspects of students' learning processes. Goals were to ensure that student responses were reliable and normal (quantitative data), and to examine qualitative reflections on…

Functional connectivity is the statistical association of neuronal activity time courses across distinct brain regions, supporting specific cognitive processes. This coordination of activity is likely to be highly important for complex aspects of cognition, such as the communication of fluctuating task goals from higher-order control regions to…

The study examined the etiology of individual differences in early drawing and of its longitudinal association with school mathematics. Participants (N = 14,760), members of the Twins Early Development Study, were assessed on their ability to draw a human figure, including number of features, symmetry, and proportionality. Human figure drawing was…

Being a student describes a multi-component reality with both individualistic and social inclusions. How this reality is established and how subjects position themselves in their current educational environments historically, culturally, and sociologically are one of the most controversial topics of educational sciences. Therefore, this study…