The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of one of the latest Texas legislative efforts to increase the college readiness of Texas high school graduates. The study assessed whether students falling under this mandated measure of college readiness are as successful in their college level math and English courses as students who…

Students tend to choose a field of study in which they believe they possess the most skills by comparing their performance across different domains, such as math and English. These intraindividual comparisons between domains are known as dimensional comparisons (Moller & Marsh, 2013). There are individual differences in dimensional…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between writing motivation and performance for students in grades three to five, and whether scores differed based on students' language status, gender, or grade level. Three student language groups were included: (1) emergent bilingual students currently receiving services for English…

This qualitative study uses a semi-structured interview to investigate why Saudi learners stop learning a third language and whether these reasons are permanent or temporary. The participants were six female master's degree students who had experience learning a third language outside of formal education or informal settings. This study identifies…

We investigate whether short-term in-class team-skills guidance impacts the perceptions of accounting students with lone wolf tendencies on team work, and peer evaluation systems adopted in team work. We find that students with greater lone wolf tendencies see fewer benefits from engaging in team work and are also less comfortable with peer…

Interaction is an indispensable component in second language acquisition (SLA). This review surveys the instructed SLA research, both classroom and laboratory-based, that has been conducted primarily within the interactionist approach, beginning with the core constructs of interaction, namely input, negotiation for meaning, and output. The review…

Background: This study was designed to extend our understanding of phonology and reading to include suprasegmental awareness using measures of prosodic awareness, which are complex tasks that tap into the rhythmic aspects of phonology. By requiring participants to access, reflect on and manipulate word stress, the prosodic awareness measures used…

In this closing commentary to the special edition of "Learning Disability Quarterly" ("LDQ") on parent voice in educational decision making for students with learning disabilities, we briefly survey main topics from each article, illuminating important findings from the authors, along with several questions they raise, and…

We examined whether attained socioeconomic status (SES) moderated genetic and environmental sources of individual differences in cognitive performance using pooled data from 9 adult twin studies. Prior work concerning SES moderation of cognitive performance has focused on rearing SES. The current adult sample of 12,196 individuals (aged 27-98…

The current study investigated how high-skill spellers and low-skill spellers incidentally learn words during reading. The purpose of the study was to determine whether readers can use uninformative contexts to support word learning after forming a lexical representation for a novel word, consistent with instance-based resonance processes.…

The connection between brain rhythms at rest and cognition remains poorly understood. This is especially true during early childhood in which neuroimaging data are relatively scarce. We developed a new method for collecting eyes closed and eyes open resting state electroencephalography (EEG) suitable for young children. We report results…

Recent research on individual differences in object cognition (OC) focused on determining how objects group together, and what type of processing lies behind the clusters--a single domain-general or multiple domain-specific processes. The expertise hypothesis suggests that all object categories are processed by the same mechanism that is…

Background: Research suggests that considerable individual differences may exist among preschool children in terms of emergent writing performance. However, there is no study examining this variability. Objective: This research explored the patterns of within-group individual differences in the emergent writing skills of preschool children.…

Many empirical findings of previous studies have suggested a connection between motivational factors and L2 writing. Nonetheless, the impact of motivational factors on the genre-based L2 writing has not gained much attention. The present study explored the extent to which the characteristics of two writing tasks involving different genres interact…

To date, cross-cultural studies on Theory of Mind (ToM) have predominantly focused on preschoolers. This study focuses on middle childhood, comparing two samples of mainland Chinese (n = 126) and Australian (n = 83) children aged between 5.5 and 12 years. Strange Stories, the most commonly used measure of ToM, was employed. The study aimed to…