Research has underlined the necessity to prepare pupils to cooperate in order to boost cooperative learning benefits. However, this kind of training may appear very demanding. The present study aims to demonstrate that a short preparation related to social support and targeted cooperative rules relevant for the task increases constructive…

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…

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…

In teaching, representations are used as ways to illustrate the concepts underlying a specific topic. For example, use symbols (e.g., 1?+?2?=?3) to express the concept of addition. To compare students' abilities to interpret different representations in mathematics, the symbolic representation (SR) test and the pictorial representation (PR)…

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 experiment 1, novice fourth-grade students (N = 92) who compared multiple examples that separately varied each critical aspect and then simultaneously varied all critical aspects developed better conceptual knowledge about the "altitude of a triangle" than students who compared multiple examples that did not separately vary each critical aspect…

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…

After the effectiveness of self-regulation training outside school was demonstrated, a self-regulation intervention was developed to foster the learning achievement in regular math classes. Based on the theoretical framework of self-regulated learning, self-regulation training was integrated into a math class unit. The evaluation of the…

The influence of sixth-graders' explanatory activity was studied on their teachers' academic judgment. Concerning the pupils' explanatory activity, trait-related internal explanations were chosen more to explain positive events than negative ones, whereas the reverse was observed for effort/intention-related internal explanations. In response to…

This analysis concentrates on the case of a child, Jenny. The paper suggests that the concept of liminality may hold the key to an understanding of muted subject positions like the one assumed by Jenny in a school class. Liminality is proposed as a way of conceptualizing transitions where the subject in question transgresses established rules and…

In this article, the concept of Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) is transposed from a work context, in which it was developed, to secondary school. Two studies test the assumption of a social valorization of OCB declaration in a school context. In Study 1, 445 pupils (sixth-graders to ninth-graders) answered an OCB questionnaire,…

Groups of mathematically strong and weak second-, fourth- and sixth-graders were individually confronted with numerosities smaller and larger than 100 embedded in one-, two- or three-dimensional realistic contexts. While one third of these contexts were totally unstructured (e.g., an irregular piece of land jumbled up with 72 cars), another third…

Two studies investigated the relationship between parental support, students' motivational orientations, and students' emotions during homework. It was assumed that intrinsically motivated students would feel better when parents provided much learning autonomy, while extrinsically motivated students would experience more positive affect when…

The aim of this study was to explore comprehension monitoring and perceived use of reading strategies as factors of reading comprehension. Participants were elementary school students from the fifth to the eighth grade. Error correction and text sensitivity tasks from the Metacomprehension test (Pazzaglia, De Beni, & Cristante, 1994), and the…