Teachers and supervisors of reading instruction need to stay abreast of trends and concerns when assisting pupils to achieve more optimally. Reading which meets high expectations is needed in school and in society. Thus, professionals involved in teaching reading in different academic and curriculum areas need to utilize the best methods of…

There are inevitable challenges standing in the way of the success of any approach to Instructional Design. Some are being faced up to. Some are not. Not least among them is the absence of empirically established principles undergirding Instructional Design prescriptions. The challenge it poses is to their reliability and validity. Nothing that…

Dot comparison tasks are commonly used to index an individual's Approximate Number System (ANS) acuity, but the cognitive processes involved in completing these tasks are poorly understood. Here, we investigated how factors including numerosity ratio, set size and visual cues influence task performance. Forty-four children aged 7-9 years completed…

Underpinned by the transactional model of stress (TMS), this systematic review synthesizes research testing the role of primary and secondary appraisals in the relationship between peer victimization and adjustment. A comprehensive literature search was undertaken and 23 articles were included in the review. Primary appraisals of threat and…

Many children fail to master fraction arithmetic even after years of instruction. A recent theory of fraction arithmetic (Braithwaite, Pyke, & Siegler, 2017) hypothesized that this poor learning of fraction arithmetic procedures reflects poor conceptual understanding of them. To test this hypothesis, we performed three experiments examining…

We tested the theoretically driven hypotheses that children's orthographic and semantic learning are associated with their word reading and reading comprehension skills, even when orthographic and semantic knowledge are taken into account. A sample of 139 English-speaking Grade 3 children completed a learning task in which they read stories about…

Developing news media literacy skills is recognized as an important part of becoming an informed citizen, but not enough research examines how growth in media literacy differs by individual characteristics. Using a panel study of undergraduate students, we examine which predispositions predict growth in news media literacy beliefs over the…

Inhibition is often conceptualized as a unitary construct reflecting the ability to ignore and suppress irrelevant information. At the same time, it has been subdivided into inhibition of prepotent responses (i.e., the ability to stop dominant responses) and resistance to distracter interference (i.e., the ability to ignore distracting…

Individual differences are theorised as being key predictors of students' lecture attendance. Understanding students' (lack of) motivation for studying is an essential first step in supporting these individual differences and potentially increasing class/lecture attendance. The current study explored the role of students' deficits in motivations…

School systems that use a one-size-fits-all model continue to under-serve nearly all of their students. These schools prepare young people for an industrial world that no longer exists. Rigid class structures are the norm. Little, if any, attention is given to the social and emotional skills that even the business community has listed as top…

The standard model of the role of early experience in human development assumes that children's environments in their first years of life are dominant influences on who they become as adults. The standard model favors interventions to improve children's long-term outcomes that start early in life and are intensive in time and attention from…

Many children fail to master fraction arithmetic even after years of instruction. A recent theory of fraction arithmetic (Braithwaite, Pyke, & Siegler, in press) hypothesized that this poor learning of fraction arithmetic procedures reflects poor conceptual understanding of them. To test this hypothesis, we performed three experiments…

Although most second language learning studies involve high-educated participants, addressing low-educated participants seems important as research suggests that education background impacts second language (L2) learning efficiency. A controversial point in the L2 learning literature is the role of corrective feedback (CF). Research on CF in…

Research on sources of individual difference in parental Infant-Directed Speech (IDS) is limited and there is a particular lack of research on fathers' compared to mothers' speech. This study examined the predictive relations between infant characteristics and variability in paternal lexical diversity (LD) in dyadic free play with two-year-olds (M…

This book examines the role of interlocutors and their individual differences (IDs) in second language (L2) development from four theoretical lenses: the cognitive-interactionist approach, sociocultural theory, the variationist approach, and complex dynamic systems theory. A theoretical overview to each approach is written by a preeminent scholar…