Growth modeling has been of interest in many assessment programs, including both highstakes and low-states tests. Growth could be modeled using different approaches. This study models growth with an Item Response Theory (IRT) based approach that utilizes item response data. It investigates the impact of complex student clustering structure where…

This article discusses estimation of multilevel/hierarchical linear models that include cluster-level random intercepts and random slopes. Viewing the models as structural, the random intercepts and slopes represent the effects of omitted cluster-level covariates that may be correlated with included covariates. The resulting correlations between…

In an eye tracking experiment during reading we examined whether preview benefit could be observed from 2 words to the right of the currently fixated word if that word was the 2nd constituent of a spaced compound. The boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to orthogonally manipulate whether participants saw an identity or nonword preview of the…

Single-case designs are a class of research designs for evaluating intervention effects on individual cases. The designs are widely applied in certain fields, including special education, school psychology, clinical psychology, social work, and applied behavior analysis. The multiple baseline design (MBD) is the most frequently used single-case…

Reader expectations form across hierarchical scales of discourse (e.g., from coarse to fine: genre, narrative, syntax). Cross-scale interactivity produces word reading times (RTs) with multifractal structure. After introducing multifractals, we test two hypotheses regarding their relevance to reader expectations: (1) multifractal evidence of…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine how school principals in urban settings distributed their time working on critical school functions. We also examined who principals worked with and how their time allocation patterns varied by school contextual characteristics. Research Method/Approach: The study was conducted in an urban school…

As writing is a complex and resource demanding task, high-quality writing instruction is indispensable from primary grades on to support beginning writers in developing effective writing skills. Writing research should therefore provide teachers and schools with evidence-based guidelines for teaching writing in daily practice. In this respect, the…

Attentional control of referential information is an important contributor to the structure of discourse. We investigated how attention and memory interplay during visually situated sentence production. We manipulated speakers' attention to the agent or the patient of a described event by means of a referential or a dot visual cue. We also…

Few studies on male-female inequalities in education have elaborated on whether school characteristics affect girls' and boys' educational performance differently. This study investigated how school resources, being schools' socioeconomic composition, proportion of girls, and proportion of highly educated teachers, and school practices, being…

Employing achievement goal theory (Ames "Journal of Educational psychology," 84(3), 261-271, 1992), we explored science teachers' instruction and its relation to students' motivation for science learning and school culture. Based on the TARGETS framework (Patrick et al. "The Elementary School Journal," 102(1), 35-58, 2001) and…

The aim of this longitudinal study among 9223 students from grade 7 and grade 9 (age 13-14 and 15-16) was to assess whether immigrant status and gender are associated with the level and change (slope) in school burnout among lower secondary school students in the Helsinki metropolitan area. Ninety-seven percent of the variation in school burnout…

This longitudinal study examined the influence of prekindergarten teacher characteristics and classroom instructional processes during mathematical activities on the growth of mathematics learning scores in prekindergarten, kindergarten, and first grade. Participants attended state-funded and Head Start prekindergarten programs. Mathematical…

School-level contextual factors have been found to influence reports of school climate. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the extent to which these associations are related to the school climate traits being measured or the methods (i.e., informants) used to obtain them. Data from a multilevel multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) design in…

Psychological safety is the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Critical team events such as conflict and faultlines (hypothetical lines that split a team into subgroups) should impact psychological safety. Previous research has shown the benefits of task conflict on team outcomes under certain conditions and the…

Prior research suggests that learners study and remember information differently depending upon the type of test they expect to later receive. The current experiments investigate how testing expectations impact the study of and memory for valuable information. Participants studied lists of words ranging in value from 1 to 10 points with the goal…