The role of teacher agency in professional learning has been the subject of several qualitative studies but has not yet been tested in an experimental setting. To provide causal evidence of the impact of teacher agency on the effectiveness of professional learning, we conducted a preregistered randomized controlled trial in an online computer…

Organizational change is a phenomenon that must be faced and carried out by every individual in the organization to achieve organizational goals. Embodiments of organizational change often occur not because it suits the needs of the organization but because of personal interests and power. This study aimed to determine the main factors that can…

Though argumentation is a key component of scientific knowledge construction practices, it rarely occurs in classrooms worldwide. Moreover, related literature in the context of genetics and evolution learning primarily addresses them separately. In contrast, this paper is part of broader research on genetics and evolution instruction taught…

Students' causal attributions play an important role in recent studies due to their effects on academic self-concept and performances. Most common causal attributions are students' ability, effort, task difficulty, and chance. The present study aims at identifying students' preferred causal attributions of failure and success while experimenting.…

This article presents a self-paced reading study comparing the online processing of interclausal discourse relations in native speakers of English and German. The study aims to contribute to two overarching questions: First, it puts to the test the so-called causality-by-default hypothesis, which states that causality is a default assumption,…

Based on existing studies on welfare and education regimes, the paper aims at strengthening the conceptual foundations of comparative research in education and trust by identifying relevant system-level characteristics, deriving analytical dimensions as a framework for cross-national comparison, and exploring how these dimensions might be linked…

This paper studies how increasing teacher compensation at hard-to-staff schools can reduce inequality in access to qualified teachers. Leveraging an unconditional change in the teacher compensation structure in Peru, we first show causal evidence that increasing salaries at less desirable locations attracts better quality applicants and improves…

This article seeks to examine some of the problems in current policy, pedagogy and practice through the concept of reductionism. It examines various forms which this may take involving inappropriate scientific methodologies, a diminished sense of structure (or, conversely, agency), temporal confusion and teleological/ethical reductionism, drawing…

This article makes the case for shadowing as ethnographic methodology: focusing attention on what occurs as interlocutors move among settings and situations. Whereas ethnographers often zoom in on one principal set of situations or site, we argue that intersituational variation broadens and deepens the researcher's ethnographic account as well as…

Despite providing advanced coursework online to learners around the world, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have had notoriously low completion rates. Self-regulated learning (SRL) frames strategies that students can use to enhance motivation and promote their engagement, persistence, and performance selfmonitoring. Understanding which SRL…

When navigating unfamiliar social environments, it is important to identify who is powerful. Determining who has power can be challenging because observers may have limited social information, and because people achieve influence for many reasons. In experiments with 3- to 5-year-old children (n = 192) and adults (n = 32), we investigated the…

Abstract The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between cellphone use and achievement goals in junior high school students. The participants were 282 students randomly selected from a secondary school in Xi'an, China. The Frequency of Cellphone Use Questionnaire and the Achievement Goal Questionnaire were used as measurement…

Purpose: We proposed and tested a causal instantiation of the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) framework, linking acoustics, intelligibility, and communicative participation in the context of dysarthria. Method: Speech samples and communicative participation scores were collected…

Inflectional affixes expressing the same grammatical category (e.g., subject agreement) tend to appear in the same morphological position in the word. We hypothesize that this cross-linguistic tendency toward "category clustering" is at least partly the result of a learning bias, which facilitates the transmission of morphology from one…

Using a dataset that includes over 17 million students from across all 50 states, we estimate the causal impact of making structural transitions into middle school (in grades 4, 5, 6, or 7) on student math and reading achievement trajectories. This dataset provides an ideal opportunity to engage in the valuable scientific practice of conducting…