Understanding children's motivations to read and preferred materials is key to fostering reading skills and promoting a national reading culture. This study, conducted a decade after the launch of the "Soma Rwanda" (Rwanda Read) national reading initiative, explores children's access to books at home, their reading preferences, and the…

Children begin to reason about gender and others' gender-typed preferences from early in life, yet not enough is known about whether their reasoning reflects only binary categorization or a more nuanced way understanding of variation in gender. Further, little is known about how children's conception of their own gender affects how they think…

Specific learning and attention difficulties are often first identified in childhood, but they can cause lifelong academic and occupational challenges. We explored the prevalence of these difficulties and the representation of sex and ethnicity amongst all first-year students in United Kingdom (UK) higher education (HE) across 12 years--almost 5.7…

Educational tracking refers to the grouping of students based on their academic abilities. Although tracking has been intensively debated in terms of its impact on academic outcomes, this study assesses whether educational tracks effectively constitute a "social boundary" between youth. Data from 11 surveys (Total N = 38,372) gathered…

Background: School meals were served free of charge to all public school students in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, but some students still did not participate. Methods: In this mixed-methods study, surveys and interviews were conducted with food service directors (FSDs) from California (n = 556 surveys; n = 29 interviews) and…

Pakistan's evolution into a research-centric nation, recognized by Clarivate Analytics, suggests a transition towards a knowledge-based economy. However, the prevalence of academic dishonesty within Pakistan's academic institutions raises concerns, potentially impeding the realization of its intellectual prowess. This research therefore examines…

Rural school administrators prefer hiring homegrown teachers because they are more likely to stay than non-local teachers; however, administrators need to hire non-local candidates to meet their staffing needs. Our examination of rural teachers' preferences for local was guided by person-organization fit theory. Specifically, we investigated the…

Case studies are an educational tool that can promote active learning, and make learning more accessible, by serving as frameworks for student meaning-making. This action research project focused on the student experience of case studies; aiming to understand how students respond to being taught with case studies, whether they are able to engage…

This study aimed to investigate university students' preferences for and reported instructor practices of written feedback (WF) and how these align with instructors' perceptions and self-reported practices in EFL writing classrooms. An 80-item survey was conducted with 13 instructors and their 210 students at a Moroccan university. The findings…

Several studies have noted that humanists have not been as quick or enthusiastic in their adoption of Open Access (OA) as their colleagues in other disciplines. This article leverages the Ithaka S+R US 2021 Faculty Survey to provide contextualized analysis of the OA and Open Education Resources (OER) preferences of humanities scholars, as well as…

This is a quantitative study on language and racial attitudes among learners of French in the English-dominant context of British Columbia (Canada). Such attitudes matter because they can have an impact on students' learning outcomes in and outside the classroom and they reflect linguistic and racial ideologies that exist in society. A verbal…

Understanding students' expectations of university study is a foundational requirement for successful transition practice. However, research regarding students' knowledge of the education-employment pathways they are about to commence remains limited. Exploratory research has shown that many Australian university students have limited or…

This study aims to assess the efficacy of active learning strategies within the context of open and distance learning (ODL), considering that most participants are adults. To investigate the practical implementation of active learning in the Open and Distance Learning (ODL) setting, two research questions have been formulated regarding the…

Role models are critical for broadening participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM); however, little is known about STEM role model characteristics most likely to promote identification. This study focused on adolescents' preferences and identification with diverse STEM role models featured in online videos. Findings…

A data-driven model where individual learning behavior is a linear combination of certain stylized learning patterns scaled by learners' affinities is proposed. The absorption of stylized behavior through the affinities constitutes "building blocks" in the model. Non-negative matrix factorization is employed to extract common learning…