The often observed decline in students' self-perceptions across transition to secondary school after grade 6 is often attributed to students' entry to puberty. This study aims to examine whether lowered self-perceptions can be observed after transition in Germany which occurs after grade 4 and thus takes place before puberty. Fifth graders (N =…

Objective: To explore effects of the technological interface on reading comprehension in a Norwegian school context. Participants: 72 tenth graders from two different primary schools in Norway. Method: The students were randomized into two groups, where the first group read two texts (1400-2000 words) in print, and the other group read the same…

The purpose of the research was to develop a questionnaire to measure dimensions of academic hardiness in late elementary school children. Questionnaires were distributed to 1474 children. After a set of exploratory factor analyses in studies 1 and 2, the confirmatory factor analysis results provided support for the 9-factor solution which…

The aim of this research was to learn about the involvement of immigrant parents in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country (Spain) pertaining to the education of their children who study at the Primary Education level. A questionnaire was created based upon the preliminary qualitative research for its subsequent application to a broad…

The importance of relationships in education has been well established in the literature. However, the nature of relationship is seldom defined and as a result interpersonal and learning relationships are conflated and so implicitly treated as synonymous. Here we argue that learning relationships are different from interpersonal relationships, but…

This article is devoted to some of the educational quandaries stemming from the fact that mathematics is a discourse that creates its own objects. More specifically, we ask how the participants of classroom learning-teaching processes cope with the seemingly paradoxical situation in which they are supposed to talk about objects, of the existence…

The view of learning as a particular type of the activity of communicating with others and with oneself has already been shown to unify the once separate lines of study devoted to cognitive and to social aspects of learning. This approach is now extended so as to include the study of affect. In this article, emotional expressions are treated as an…

Taking as the point of departure the vision of school algebra as a formalized meta-discourse of arithmetic, we have been following five pairs of 7th grade students as they progress in algebraic discourse during 24 months, from their informal algebraic talk to the formal algebraic discourse, as taught in school. Our analysis follows changes that…

School change is always local and dependent on the kinds of resources that are available. In this paper we explore the notion that knowledge is an important resources for vernacular educational reform. In order to explore this contention, we use the lens of cross-curricular changes undertaken by English schools in receipt of funding from Creative…

Can process portfolios that support students in goal setting, reflection, self-evaluation and feedback have a positive impact on students' writing self-efficacy? This article presents the findings of a yearlong study conducted in three 4th grade elementary classes in Cyprus where paper-based and web-based portfolios were implemented to help…

A visual research project addressed school children's concepts of ideal learning environments. Drawings and accompanying narratives were collected from Year 5 and Year 6 children in nine Queensland primary schools. The 133 submissions were analysed and coded to develop themes, identify key features and consider the uses of imagination. The…

The purpose of this study was to examine how teachers manage their classroom in co-taught lessons. The data were collected by observing and interviewing a pair of primary school teachers. The most important influence of collaboration on classroom management seemed to be the emotional support of another adult, and the opportunity to use different…

This paper describes changes which took place in 37 Hong Kong primary schools where class sizes were reduced from 38 to between 20 and 25. Chinese, English and mathematics classes were observed over three years from Primary 1 (aged 6) to Primary 3. For 75% of observations no child was the focus of the teacher's attention in large classes. Reducing…

Previous studies have shown that both creativity and emotional intelligence (EI) were related to children school performance. In this study, we investigated the incremental validity of EI over creativity in an elementary school setting. Seventy-three children aged from 9 to 12 years old were recruited to participate in the study. Verbal and…

There has been considerable debate over the ways in which children's early literacy skills develop over time. Using confirmatory multidimensional scaling (MDS) growth analysis, this paper directly tested the hypothesis of a cumulative trajectory versus a compensatory trajectory of development in early literacy skills among a group of 1233…