Educational systems with a high level of tracking and vocational orientation have been shown to improve the allocation of school-leavers in the labor market. However, tracked educational systems are also known to increase inequality of educational opportunity. This presumed trade-off between equality and labor market preparation is clearly rooted…

This study uses the PIAAC data to examine the relationships between education system characteristics (e.g. early tracking and vocational education orientation) and distributions of adult numeracy skills. It also investigates the effects of postponing the tracking age and easing university access for students on a vocational track on the average…

It is hardly disputed that educational institutions carry responsibility for the education of democratic citizens through the enhancement of civic and political engagement. Despite the wealth of studies on civic and citizenship education, scholars have not yet examined the relevance of national educational institutional factors. This study…

Audio-visual recording and location tracking produce enormous quantities of digital data with which researchers can document children's everyday interactions in naturalistic settings and assessment contexts. Machine learning and other computational approaches can produce replicable, automated measurements of these big behavioral data. The…

Learners' adaptation to academic trajectory is shaped by several influencing factors that ought to be considered while attempting to design an intervention towards improving academic performance. Emotion is one factor that influences students' academic orientation and performance. Tracking emotions in text by psychologists have long been a subject…

Background: Little is known about the effectiveness of instructors when presenting content in videos alone. In recent years, researchers have increasingly begun to explore the effects of instructors' social cues (e.g., eye gaze, body orientation, etc.) on learning. However, previous studies exploring the effects of eye gaze have confounded the…

Multiple object tracking (MOT) is an attentional task wherein observers attempt to track multiple targets among moving distractors. Contour interpolation is a perceptual process that fills-in nonvisible edges on the basis of how surrounding edges (inducers) are spatiotemporally related. In five experiments, we explored the automaticity of…

Why do some children feel happy about violating ethical norms whereas others feel guilty? This study examined whether children's attention to two types of competing cues during hypothetical transgressions related to their subsequent emotions. Eye tracking was used to test whether attending to other-oriented cues (i.e., a victim's face) versus…

Visual search in dynamic environments, for example lifeguarding or CCTV monitoring, has several fundamentally different properties to standard visual search tasks. The visual environment is constantly moving, a range of items could become targets and the task is to search for a certain event. We developed a novel task in which participants were…

Perspective-taking plays an important role in daily life, allowing consideration of other people's perspectives and viewpoints. This study used a large sample of 265 community-based participants (aged 20-86 years) to examine changes in perspective-taking abilities--a component of "Theory of Mind"--across adulthood, and how these changes…

Although AR technology seems to be promising for helping students learn complicated and abstract concepts, whether the positive effects of this new technology can be applied to the learning of three-dimensional geometric concepts, and what factors might mediate its effectiveness are questions worth further investigation. This study used the…

This study uses a Q methodology to track the changing motivational profiles of 15 Chinese university students simultaneously engaged in second-language (L2) English and third-language (L3) Spanish learning over 1.5 years. Guided by complex dynamic systems theory (CDST), the study aims to investigate the initial trigger that propelled the Chinese…

The dichotomy between explicit and implicit theory of mind remains controversial. This study proposed a developmental and social-constructionist perspective that challenges this notion through a model showing that coordination of perspectives (CoP) is a continuously developing ability in children. Our tested model comprises eight distinct…

Background: Consumers are adopting wearable activity trackers to stay healthy and monitor their fitness progress. Purpose: The study investigates the acceptance of WAT by Generation Z users and draws upon achievement goal theory by theorizing how and why consumers use WAT. Methods: Structural equation modeling was employed to analyze intentions to…

This dissertation investigates an overarching research question: how can recognition-type incentives, such as gamification and peer gifting, motivate users' knowledge seeking and contributions in e-learning and online Q&A (question and answer) communities? To address this question, I conducted three studies. In Chapter 2, I examine how social…