The use of the pointing gesture is one of the first ways to communicate with the world. This gesture emerges before the second year of life and it is assumed to be the first form of intentional communication. This meta-analysis examined the concurrent and longitudinal relation between pointing and the emergence of language. Twenty-five studies…

The transient enhancement of performance on spatial tasks in standardized tests after exposure to the first movement "allegro con spirito" of the Mozart sonata for two pianos in D major (KV 448) is referred to as the Mozart effect since its first observation by Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky (1993). These findings turned out to be amazingly hard to…

The perception and processing of temporal information are tasks the brain must continuously perform. These include measuring the duration of stimuli, storing duration information in memory, recalling such memories, and comparing two durations. How the brain accomplishes these tasks, however, is still open for debate. The temporal bisection task,…

Meta-analysis of studies with two groups and two measurement occasions must employ order-one effect size indices to represent study outcomes. Especially with non-random assignment, non-equivalent control group designs, a statistical analysis restricted to post-treatment scores can lead to severely biased conclusions. The 109 primary studies…

This study investigated the efficacy of counseling and psychotherapy interventions for youth in schools. Data were examined for 107 studies that included 132 treatment interventions. Overall efficacy was d = 0.45 and was significantly different from zero. Interventions for adolescents outperformed those of children, treatment groups that were…

Whereas the motivational aspects of pay are well-documented, the notion that high pay leads to high levels of satisfaction is not without debate. The current study used meta-analysis to estimate the population correlation between pay level and measures of pay and job satisfaction. Cumulating across 115 correlations from 92 independent samples,…

Individual differences in general mental ability ("g") have important implications across multiple disciplines. Research suggests that the variance in "g" may be due to a general fitness factor. If this is the case, a relationship should exist between "g" and other reliable indicators of fitness. Some empirical results indicate a relationship…

Meta-analysis is the statistical analysis of a collection of analysis results from individual studies, conducted for the purpose of integrating the findings. Structural equation modeling (SEM), on the other hand, is a multivariate technique for testing hypothetical models with latent and observed variables. This article shows that fixed-effects…

Previous studies (J. S. Carroll & W. J. Doherty, 2003) have asserted that premarital education programs have a positive effect on program participants. Using meta-analytic methods of current best practices to look across the entire body of published and unpublished evaluation research on premarital education, we found a more complex pattern of…

This address was given as the final-day keynote of the Sixth International Drama in Education Research Institute (IDIERI) in Sydney, 2009. Using the Institute's title as his theme, O'Toole briefly surveys the growth of drama education research of the last two decades, and the changing landscape of practice and research. He then conducts an…

Somatotopy within the orofacial region of the human motor cortex has been a central concept in interpreting the results of neuroimaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation studies of normal and disordered speech. Yet, somatotopy has been challenged by studies showing overlap among the effectors within the homunculus. In order to address this…

The issue of violent video game influences on youth violence and aggression remains intensely debated in the scholarly literature and among the general public. Several recent meta-analyses, examining outcome measures most closely related to serious aggressive acts, found little evidence for a relationship between violent video games and aggression…

Research indicates that increasing teacher-directed opportunities to respond (TD-OTR) positively impacts student outcomes. Prior reviews of the empirical literature focused on outcomes for students with emotional behavioral disorders or on TD-OTRs as one of many classroom-management practices; however, prior reviews did not examine effects of…

To determine whether formative writing assessments that are directly tied to everyday classroom teaching and learning enhance students' writing performance, we conducted a meta-analysis of true and quasi-experiments conducted with students in grades 1 to 8. We found that feedback to students about writing from adults, peers, self, and computers…

Published articles permit mapping international and comparative education research. We reviewed 605 articles published 2004-2008 in four major journals. Using title, abstract, and entire text we explored thematic focus, geographic focus, level/type of education studied, method, and funding. The economic, political, and social context of education…