This study examined the development of school-related causality beliefs which are children's generalized perceptions of the utility or power of different categories of specific means in producing school outcomes. Based on the action theory perspective, we analyzed the developmental model of these beliefs as well as the trajectories of the…

The present study examined the use of narrative categories and mental state words in the fictional, personal, and hypothetical stories written by 150 children in the third, fourth, and fifth grades of primary school. There were three main results. First, children were better able to write fictional and hypothetical than personal stories, when…

This study examined the effectiveness of a social-cognitive training model of self-regulation on students' dribbling performance, calibration accuracy, and motivational beliefs. Participants were 120 fifth and sixth graders. Students who sequentially experienced emulative and self-control practice setting either process or performance goals…

When students read for learning, they frequently are required to integrate text and graphics information into coherent knowledge structures. The following study aimed at analyzing how students deal with texts and how they deal with graphics when they try to integrate the two sources of information. Furthermore, the study investigated differences…

Learning materials incorporating written texts as well as instructional pictures are the basis for learning in many subjects. However, text-picture integration makes high cognitive demands of learners, and it seems plausible that the development of this competence is influenced by teachers' instructional skills. The present studies investigated…

In this study, we compared two instruction methods on spelling performance: a rewriting instruction in which children repeatedly rewrote words and an ambiguous property instruction in which children deliberately practiced on a difficult word aspect. Moreover, we examined whether the testing effect applies to spelling performance. One hundred…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the structure of metacognitive knowledge in fifth grade pupils and its relation to school achievement. Since the structure of metacognitive knowledge is controversially discussed with little empirical evidence for either its domain specificity or its domain transferability, the debate remains…

A large body of evidence shows that many of the academic difficulties Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) children have may be related to their problems in executive control. However, the particular case of expressive writing has not been deeply explored. The present study examines the typical school exercise of writing a letter.…

Using Harter's ("Child Dev" 53(1):87-97, 1982) perceived competence scale, this study integrates several paradigms related to the issues of self-perceived competence, stability or change and attributional theory. It examines how 268 Belgian and Portuguese fifth graders consider their scholastic, social and physical competence at present and in a…

The causal explanation has an effect: (1) on expectancy and value at an intra-individual level (Weiner, 2000); (2) on feeling and affective evaluation at an interpersonal level (Weiner 2000); and (3) on institutional judgment at an organizational level (Dubois, 2003). A study was conducted with pupils between the 4th and 9th grades in order to…

This study examined parental views of their child's educability through the parents' perceptions of their child's resilience. The purposes of the study were: (1) to examine psychometric properties of the rating scale created to measure parental views of their child's educational and psychological resilience, (2) to explore whether the parents'…

This paper reports results from two studies aimed at examining whether perception of social acceptance and actual social acceptance differ according to the presence of an illusion of scholastic incompetence. Results of both studies conducted in Belgium and in Quebec (respectively 179 and 543 participants) show that children's illusion of…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention program aimed to develop fair play behaviours in a school Olympic Education program. One hundred and twenty six, 5th-grade students from 4 elementary schools participated in this study, 66 of which were in the experimental group and 60 in the control group. The results…

This follow-up study set out to examine whether parents' recollections of their own school would predict their degree of satisfaction with the functioning of their child's school. A group of academically educated and vocationally educated parents with a child in preschool (N=391) were asked to think back to their primary school days and evaluate…

This study analyzed gender differences in achievement emotions in the domain of mathematics. Based on Pekrun's (2000, 2006) control-value theory of achievement emotions, we hypothesized that there are gender differences in mathematics emotions due to the students' different levels of control and value beliefs in mathematics, even when controlling…