Background: Academic buoyancy is students' ability to successfully deal with setbacks and challenges that are typical of academic life. The present study extends previous preliminary cross-sectional work that tentatively identified five motivational predictors of academic buoyancy--referred to as the "5Cs" of academic buoyancy: confidence…

This article describes methods for analysing classroom talk, comparing their strengths and weaknesses. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are described and assessed for their strengths and weaknesses, with a discussion of the mixed use of such methods. It is acknowledged that particular methods are often embedded in particular…

Background: The majority of available psychometric tests originates from the Western World and was designed to suit the culture, language, and socio-economic status of the respective populations. Few tests have been validated in the developing world despite the growing interest in examining effects of biological and environmental factors on…

Background: Evaluating the impact of nutrition interventions on developmental outcomes in developing countries can be challenging since most assessment tests have been produced in and for developed country settings. Such tests may not be valid measures of children's abilities when used in a new context. Aims: We present several principles for the…

Background: A strong link between phonological awareness (PA) and literacy exists, but the origins of this link are difficult to investigate, since PA skills are hard to test in young, pre-literate children, and many studies neither include such children nor report children's initial literacy levels. Aims: To examine PA and literacy in children…

Background: The use of cognitive tests is increasing in Africa but little is known about how such tests are affected by the great ethnic and linguistic diversity on the continent. Aim: To assess ethnic and linguistic group differences in cognitive test performance in the West African country of the Gambia and to investigate the sources of these…

Background: It has been proposed that motivational responses outside people's conscious awareness can be primed to affect academic performance. The current research focused on the relationship between primed evaluative letters (A and F), explicit and implicit achievement motivation, and cognitive performance. Aim: Given the evaluative connotation…

Background: Teacher expectations have been a fruitful area of psychological research for 40 years. Researchers have concentrated on expectations at the individual level (i.e. expectations for individual students), rather than at the class level. Studies of class level expectations have begun to identify specific teacher factors that make a…

Background: Recent models of evaluation anxiety emphasize the importance of personal knowledge and self-regulatory processes in the development of test anxiety, but do not theorize a route for situational influences. Aim: To investigate the relationship between test anxiety and personal knowledge beliefs (achievement goals and perceived academic…

Background: Young drivers are overrepresented in road traffic fatalities and collisions. Attempts to address this problem with pre-driver education have not met with unambiguous success. However, there is a lack of research on whether pre-driver education can change psychological antecedents to behaviour. Aims: The framework of the theory of…

Background: Research which has investigated children's attitudes to bullying has found that the majority of children display anti-bullying attitudes. However, a small minority of children do appear to admire the bully and lack sympathy for victims of bullying. The just world belief theory has received a great deal of attention in recent years with…

Background: The differential effectiveness of schools and teachers receives a growing interest, but few studies focused on the relevance of student ethnicity for this effectiveness and only a small number of these studies investigated teaching in terms of the teacher-student interpersonal relationship. Furthermore, the methodology employed often…

Background: Recent research has suggested that intergroup contacts with out-group members can both reduce prejudice and is associated with attitude change. Aim: This study extends prior work in Northern Ireland to examine parental and schooling effects on children's attitudes in a post-conflict environment. Sample: A large-scale cross-sectional…

Background: Museums can serve as rich resources for families to learn about the social world through engagement with exhibits and parent-child conversation about exhibits. Aims: This study examined ways of engaging parents and child about two related exhibits at a cultural and history museum. Sample participants consisted of families visiting the…

Background: Poor comprehenders are children who show significant deficits in their reading comprehension performance, despite average, or above-average word reading ability. To date, there have been no in-depth studies of the mathematical performance profiles of such children. Aims: This study aimed to explore the mathematical profiles of poor…