Understanding students' progress towards meeting grade-level expectations within an academic year is the goal of many education stakeholders so that they can make decisions to adjust instruction and improve students' learning trajectories. The purpose of this study was to explore 4th and 5th grade students' progress towards meeting expectations in…

Background/Context: The early school years are an important time for building family-school relationships (Sibley & Dearing, 2014). As such, family engagement is a top priority of organizations that serve young children, such as Head Start. Children whose parents report being involved in their school demonstrate greater social competence and…

Correlational studies link spatial-test scores and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics achievement. Here we asked whether children's understanding of astronomical phenomena would benefit from a prior intervention targeting a core component of children's projective spatial concepts--understanding that viewers' visual experiences are…

There is a need for strengths-based intervention approaches for autistic youth during the transition to adulthood. In the current study, we explored parent perspectives about youth strengths during adolescence. We combined data from three studies which included semi-structured interviews about parents' perspectives on preparing for adulthood with…

Cadaveric prosections are effective learning tools in anatomy education. They range from a fully dissected, sometimes plastinated, complete cadaver ("in situ" prosections), to a single, carefully dissected structure detached from a cadaver ("ex situ" prosections). While most research has focused on the advantages and…

The study of socio-cognitive abilities emerged from intelligence research, and their specificity remains controversial until today. In recent years, the psychometric structure of face cognition (FC)--a basic facet of socio-cognitive abilities--was extensively studied. In this review, we summarize and discuss the divergent psychometric structures…

The purpose of this study is to provide content validity evidence for the Verbal Behavior Milestones Assessment and Placement Program (VB-MAPP). A national panel of 13 experts provided an evaluation of the domain relevance, age appropriateness, method of measurement appropriateness, and domain representation across the three levels of the…

As low-stakes testing contexts increase, low test-taking effort may serve as a serious validity threat. One common solution to this problem is to identify noneffortful responses and treat them as missing during parameter estimation via the effort-moderated item response theory (EM-IRT) model. Although this model has been shown to outperform…

Domestic violence typically recurs over time, involving the same victim and perpetrator. When complainants make an allegation about abuse, they are required to particularise the offence and recall details unique to specific occurrences. This experiment investigated adults' ability to particularise an occurrence after experiencing a single or…

Interest in spatial ability has grown over the past few decades following the emergence of correlational evidence associating spatial aptitude with educational performance in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The research field at large and the anatomy education literature on this topic are mixed. In an attempt to…

Of all elementary school years, absenteeism is at its peak during kindergarten. Although much has been established about the effects of missing kindergarten school days on achievement, nothing has yet been established on absenteeism and executive function (EF) skills. Yet developing EF skills early in school is critical, and missed in-school time…

When searching for a known target, mental representations of target features, or templates, guide attention towards matching objects and facilitate recognition. When only distractor features are known, distractor templates allow irrelevant objects to be recognised and attention to be shifted away. This is particularly true in X-ray baggage search,…

Increasing research efforts are focused on explaining the cognitive bases of creativity. However, it remains unclear when and how cognitive factors such as intelligence and executive function uniquely contribute to performance on creative thinking tasks. Although a relationship between fluid intelligence (Gf) and creative cognition has been…

Evidence for associations between spatial skills and mathematics has led to the argument that spatial visualization plays a role in mathematical calculation. However, there is no single accepted definition of what spatial visualization encompasses. Here, we investigated spatial visualization in the context of a mental imagery framework. We applied…

Purpose: This study aims to examine the development of auditory selective attention to speech in noise by examining the ability of infants to prefer child-directed speech (CDS) over time-reversed speech (TRS) presented in "on-channel" and "off-channel" noise. Method: A total of 32 infants participated in the study. Sixteen…