Asking children to clarify themselves promotes their ability to uniquely identify objects in referential communication tasks. However, little is known about whether parents ask preschoolers for clarification during interactions and, if so, how. Study 1 explored how mothers clarify their preschoolers' ambiguous descriptions of the characters in…

Infants' pointing gestures are a critical predictor of early vocabulary size. However, it remains unknown precisely how pointing relates to word learning. The current study addressed this question in a sample of 108 infants, testing one mechanism by which infants' pointing may influence their learning. In Study 1, 18-month-olds, but not…

Whilst new friendships and an active social life are commonly discussed features of 'being a student', there is limited empirical research that has quantitatively studied the contribution that social factors play in students' university experience. Research that has been conducted shows that belonging and social integration are important factors…

Five-month-old infants selectively attend to novel people who sing melodies originally learned from a parent, but not melodies learned from a musical toy or from an unfamiliar singing adult, suggesting that music conveys social information to infant listeners. Here, we test this interpretation further in older infants with a more direct measure of…

Students' engagement is known to be associated with academic success and to prevent school dropouts. While many studies have considered this variable when examining school trajectories, more research is needed to investigate the factors that may sustain and promote engagement in school, regarded as a multidimensional construct (affective vs.…

There is currently considerable discussion about the relative influences of evolutionary and cultural factors in the development of early numerical skills. In particular, there has been substantial debate and study of the relationship between approximate, nonverbal (approximate magnitude system [AMS]) and exact, symbolic (symbolic number system…

In the current society, boredom has a bad reputation. Among others, one reason is that boredom is a negative predictor for cognitive performance due to the detrimental effects on attention and engagement. Recently, however, the negative reputation has been challenged by studies showing that boredom seems to promote creativity. However, those…

Narrative skill is included in emergent literacy frameworks and believed to be important for children's early reading development. Yet, empirical evidence concerning associations with other emergent literacy skills and later word reading skills is limited. We comprehensively assessed the emergent literacy skills of 3- to 5.5-year old children (n =…

This study explores measures of curiosity and autonomy as two motivation and personality predictors of personal growth initiative (PGI), an indicator of cross-cultural adjustment. The sample comprised 221 international graduate students. Structural equation modeling was utilized to identify the relations among self-perceived language skills,…

It is important to develop a critical perspective in terms of interpreting the messages to be given to the individuals through media and questioning the authenticity and content of these messages. It is therefore necessary to train the individuals called media literate who can critically perceive and evaluate the information conveyed through the…

This study examines the associations between frequency of personal prayer, frequency of worship attendance and spiritual wellbeing among 468 students attending fourth, fifth and sixth classes within 18 Church of Ireland schools located in one diocese in the Republic of Ireland. Spiritual wellbeing is measured by a modified form of the Fisher…

It is noted in the light of several studies associated with the reading-comprehension skills that fluent word reading, connectives knowledge and fluent text reading are closely related to the comprehension skill. Hence it seems possible to create a model over these concepts and their interrelationships. Within the scope of this research two…

The simple view of reading (SVR) proposes that performance in reading comprehension is the result of decoding and linguistic comprehension, and that each component is necessary but not sufficient for reading comprehension. In this study, the joint and unique predictive influences of decoding and linguistic comprehension for reading comprehension…

The aim of the study was to investigate the goal orientation and the motivational climate of university student-athletes and to reveal the relationship between the goal orientation and the motivational climate. The sample of the research consists of 212 student-athletes studying at universities. TEOSQ (Duda, 1989a;1992; Duda and Nicholls, 1992)…

The aim of this study is to examine the correlation between the frequency of using metacognitive reading strategy use and non-routine problem-solving achievements in fifth grade students. The study was conducted by using the correlational survey model, one of quantitative research methods. The participants of the study consisted of 308 fifth grade…