Students who experience mathematics anxiety have long been suggested to engage in avoidance behaviors that negatively impact their mathematics performance. However, little is known about how these avoidance behaviors manifest for highly anxious students within the context of a mathematics course. Since the use of effortful study strategies has…

Success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is often believed to require intellectual talent ("brilliance"). Given that many cultures associate men more than women with brilliance, this belief poses an obstacle to women's STEM pursuits. Here, we investigated the developmental roots of this phenomenon,…

In a previous study, parent-child praise was observed in natural interactions at home when children were 1, 2, and 3 years of age. Children who received a relatively high proportion of process praise (e.g., praise for effort and strategies) showed stronger incremental motivational frameworks, including a belief that intelligence can be developed…

Math anxiety--negative feelings toward math--is hypothesized to be associated with the avoidance of math-related activities such as taking math courses and pursuing STEM careers. However, there is little experimental evidence for the math anxiety-avoidance link. Such evidence is important for formulating how to break this relationship. We…

School-entry math achievement is a strong predictor of math achievement through high school. We asked whether reciprocal relations among math achievement, math anxiety, and entity motivational frameworks (believing that ability is fixed and a focus on performance) can help explain these persistent individual differences. We assessed 1st and 2nd…

When asked to explain their solutions to a problem, children often gesture and, at times, these gestures convey information that is different from the information conveyed in speech. Children who produce these gesture-speech "mismatches" on a particular task have been found to profit from instruction on that task. We have recently found…

Math anxiety -- negative feelings towards math -- is hypothesized to be associated with the avoidance of math-related activities such as taking math courses and pursuing STEM careers. Surprisingly, however, there is little experimental evidence for the math anxiety- avoidance link. Such evidence is important for formulating how to break this…

A dramatic shift in research priorities has recently produced a large number of ambitious randomized trials in K-12 education. In most cases, the aim is to improve student academic learning by improving classroom instruction. Embedded in these studies are theories about how the quality of classroom must improve if these interventions are to…

In April 2006, the Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR) released a report on college enrollment, preparation, and completion by students in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). This was the first endeavor in the nation to use data from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) to track the progress of a large district's students following…

The landscape of educational privatization is changing. The authors examine the rise of specialty service providers in four areas of K-12 educational services and products and the impact of these changes.

The supplemental educational services (SES) provision of No Child Left Behind introduces a federally mandated after-school tutoring intervention in schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress. This article examines market dynamics in relationship to the law's goals of expanding access to and improving the quality of after-school…