"Keeping Up with the Steins" (2006) is the first Hollywood film to focus on the Bar Mitzvah ceremony in its family, congregational, and Jewish community context. The film demonstrates how popular culture reflects community values, but may also shape them. The hero is alienated both from the synagogue service and his mega-Bar Mitzvah party. In line…

Students tend to perceive that direct communication is best. In class discussion, they've overwhelmingly conveyed their feeling that people should say what they mean and be as direct and precise as possible. Initially, they don't tend to recognize that the perception of directness is relative. What some consider clear, others consider rude. What…

When faced with a sentence like, "Some of the toys are on the table", adults, but not preschoolers, compute a scalar implicature, taking the sentence to imply that not all the toys are on the table. This paper explores the hypothesis that children fail to compute scalar implicatures because they lack knowledge of relevant scalar alternatives to…

The influence of achievement goals and social goals on help-seeking from peers in an academic context was examined in two studies. A total of 551 high school students participated in the two studies. The results across the studies demonstrated strong convergence, revealing that mastery-approach, mastery-avoidance, and friendship-approach goals…

Explanations are considered to be key aids to understanding the study of mathematics, science, and other complex disciplines. This paper discusses the role of students' explanations in making sense of data and learning to reason informally about statistical inference. We closely follow students' explanations in which they utilize their experiences…

Although it is commonly believed that women are kinder and more cooperative than men, there is conflicting evidence for this assertion. Current theories of sex differences in social behavior suggest that it may be useful to examine in what situations men and women are likely to differ in cooperation. Here, we derive predictions from both…

The clinical effectiveness of a treatment for children with dyslexia was examined, as well as the moderating impact of plausible cognitive and socio-economic factors on treatment success. Results revealed that the treatment group accrued significant greater gains than the control group in reading and spelling skills. The treatment group obtained a…

We evaluated the effects of presession satiation on challenging behavior and academic engagement during subsequent classroom activities for three 5-6 year-old children with autism. The percentage of 10-s intervals with challenging behavior and academic engagement during 20-min classroom activity sessions was observed under two conditions. One…

The defining characteristic of a bubble is unsustainable growth that eventually reverses. Bubbles typically arise when uncertainty leads to unsustainable trends, and the authors argue that there are two areas in which higher education has experienced what appear to be unsustainable trends, namely, college costs (the costs to students, parents, and…

This article focuses on the relation between student population characteristics and average test scores per school in the final grade of primary education from a dynamic perspective. Aggregated data of over 5,000 Dutch primary schools covering a 6-year period were used to study the relation between changes in school populations and shifts in mean…

The paper investigates if the provision of financial incentives has an impact on the performance of students in educational tests. The analysis is based on data from an experiment with high school students who answered multiple-choice items from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). As in TIMSS, the setup did not…

Research on the effects of second language strategy instruction (SI) has been extensive yet inconclusive. This meta-analysis, therefore, aims to provide a reliable, quantitative measure of the effect of SI as well as a description of the relationship between SI and the variables that moderate its effectiveness (i.e., different learning contexts,…

The aim of this paper is to bring critical attention to the ways in which notions of "success" and "failure" are applied to teaching and learning in schools in England and Wales. The main philosophical text that guides the discussion is Derrida's "Signature event context", which contains a reading of J.L. Austin's…

Purpose: This paper seeks to explore how managing by objectives (MBO) has been adopted in Swedish schools and to reflect on some of the consequences in a longitudinal study. Results relate to whether introduction has increased student performance and whether it works as a tool for the principals to create more effective schools.…

The Division of Violence Prevention (DVP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is committed to preventing youth violence. For the past decade, DVP has supported research on risk and protective factors associated with youth interpersonal violence and the development and evaluation of prevention programs. This commentary addresses…