The present study examined whether emotional abuse and neglect differentially predicted decreases in emotional clarity, and whether emotional clarity, in turn, predicted increases in depressive symptoms. Participants included 204 early adolescents (52% African American; 54% female; M age = 12.85 years) who completed four assessments with measures…

Financial aid plays a critical role in college access and student success. It plays an increasingly important role as the college-going population continues to diversify and the cost of college continues to rise at both public and private institutions. In this study, the authors examined whether institutional level financial aid has any direct…

Background/context: In an era of accountability and standardization, elementary social studies is consistently losing its curricular foothold to English/language arts, math, and science instruction. Purpose: This article examines the relationship between elementary teachers' perceptions of instructional autonomy, teaching context, state testing…

Background: Research has shown that the teacher-student interpersonal relationship (TSIR) is important for student motivation. Although TSIR has received a growing interest, there are only few studies that focus on changes and links between TSIR and student academic motivation in a longitudinal fashion in non-Western contexts. Aims: This study…

A challenge associated with traditional mixture regression models (MRMs), which rest on the assumption of normally distributed errors, is determining the number of unobserved groups. Specifically, even slight deviations from normality can lead to the detection of spurious classes. The current work aims to (a) examine how sensitive the commonly…

Measures of classroom environments have become central to policy efforts that assess school and teacher quality. This has sparked a wide interest in using multilevel factor analysis to test measurement hypotheses about classroom-level variables. One approach partitions the total covariance matrix and tests models separately on the…

One approach for combining single-case data involves use of multilevel modeling. In this article, the authors use a Monte Carlo simulation study to inform applied researchers under which realistic conditions the three-level model is appropriate. The authors vary the value of the immediate treatment effect and the treatment's effect on the time…

As applications of multilevel modelling in educational research increase, researchers realize that multilevel data collected in many educational settings are often not purely nested. The most common multilevel non-nested data structure is one that involves student mobility in longitudinal studies. This article provides a methodological review of…

Students who come from low-income backgrounds tend to be underidentified and underserved in gifted education. Early interventions with learners of high potential from underserved groups, including exposure to challenging curriculum and summer opportunities, are important for nurturing these students' talents and preparing them for advanced…

The purpose of this replication study was to examine the impact of the Teacher Study Group (TSG) professional development in vocabulary on first-grade teachers' knowledge of vocabulary instruction and observed teaching practice, and on students' vocabulary knowledge. Sixty-two schools from 16 districts in four states were randomly assigned to…

We evaluated two experimenter-delivered, small-group word reading programs among at-risk poor readers in Grade 1 classes of regular elementary schools using a two-arm, dual-site-matched control trial intervention. At-risk poor word readers (n = 201) were allocated to either (a) Direct Mapping and Set-for-Variability (DMSfV) or (b) Current or…

One of the most frequently touted benefits of higher education is the opportunity to interact with people different from oneself, yet these interactions do not automatically lead to positive outcomes. The purpose of this study is to explore how one particular context for diversity interactions, service-based alternative break programs, may provide…

We examine the association between grade retention and the number of same-grade friendships. Moreover, we investigate the effect of a school's proportion of retained students on these friendships and the moderating effect of this school characteristic on the relationship between retention and the number of same-grade friendships. Multilevel…

This study examined how linguistic and sociocultural diversity have an impact on the reading literacy outcomes of a representative sample of 3,549 first-language (L1) and 208 second-language (L2) fourth-grade students in the Netherlands. A multilevel modelling analysis was conducted using Progress in International Reading Literacy Study 2006 data…

Mind wandering--mentation unrelated to one's current activity and surroundings--is a ubiquitous phenomenon, but seemingly competing ideas have been proposed regarding its relation to executive cognitive processes. The control-failure hypothesis postulates that executive processes prevent mind wandering, whereas the global availability hypothesis…