Background: Socio-economic status (SES) is a powerful predictor of attainment. Research has identified multiple mechanisms that underpin the effect of SES on attainment. For example, self-regulation (processes through which individuals direct and control their attention, emotion and behaviour) has been identified as one mechanism mediating the SES…

Background: Teachers' self-reported stress is related to the quality of teacher-student interactions and students' learning outcomes. However, it is unclear if teachers' physiological stress is related to child-centred teaching practices in the classroom and whether teaching practices mediate the link between teachers' stress and students'…

Background: Children's ability to remain focused on a task despite the presence of emotionally salient distractors in the environment is crucial for successful learning and academic performance. Aims: This study investigated first-graders' allocation of attentional resources in the presence of distracting emotional, school-related social…

Background: Help-seeking research has traditionally inferred behavioural responses to the need for help from post-hoc reflections and experiments outside of the classroom context. Aim: We aimed to gain an ecologically valid understanding of the help-seeking process by examining the association between pupils' task-specific perceptions and their…

Background: Self-regulation promotes engagement within the classroom. At a physiological level, a good indicator of the ability of the system to self-regulate is cardiac vagal tone (CVT). Aims: The present study aims to assess children's change over time (1 year) in their parasympathetic regulation (by way of CVT) in response to a social and…

Background: Previous studies indicated that working memory (WM) updating and WM capacity play essential roles in mathematical ability. However, it is unclear whether WM capacity mediates the effect of WM updating on mathematics, and whether the cascading effects vary with different mathematical domains. Aims: The current study aims to explore the…

Background and Aims: Morphological awareness is an essential ability for successful reading. This study aimed to explore the contribution of morphological awareness to reading comprehension (RC) in Chinese. Particularly, this study sought to determine whether the relation between morphological awareness and RC differs across various facets of…

Background: Creativity is an important ability for problem-solving in both personal life and academic learning. Few creativity studies have investigated the development of children's creativity in disadvantaged rural areas or compared the rural-urban differences through digital game-based creativity learning. Understanding such differences can…

Mental rotation is positively related to arithmetic ability; however, the mechanism underlying this relationship remains unclear. The possible roles of working memory, place-value concept, and number line estimation in the correlation between mental rotation and whole-number computation were investigated. One hundred and fifty-five first-grade…

Backgrounds: Decoding and vocabulary are two essential abilities to reading comprehension. Investigating the roles of decoding and vocabulary in Chinese reading development can not only provide empirical evidence to enrich the current reading theories but also have implications for educational practice. Aims: To examine the developing importance…

Background: Students' self-concept of ability is an important predictor of their achievement emotions. However, little is known about how learning environments affect these interrelations. Aims: Referring to Pekrun's control-value theory, this study investigated whether teacher-reported teaching quality at the classroom level would moderate the…

Background: Written composition requires handwriting, spelling, and text planning skills, all largely learned through school instruction. Students' rate of learning to compose text in their first months at school will depend, in part, on their literacy-related abilities at school start. These effects have not previously been explored. Aim: We…

Background: Students vary in their initial achievement when they enter school and their rate of academic growth as they move through school. These differences have implications for classroom instruction and educational policy. Although previous research has examined initial achievement and growth differences, a gap remains in understanding how…

Background: Students, parents, teachers, and theorists often advocate for direct instruction on both concepts and procedures, but some theorists suggest that including instruction on procedures in combination with concepts may limit learning opportunities and student understanding. Aims: This study evaluated the effect of instruction on a math…

Background: The need to focus more on children's abilities to change requires new assessment technologies in education. Process-oriented assessment can be useful in this regard. Dynamic testing has the potential to provide in-depth information about children's learning processes and cognitive abilities. Aim: This study implemented a…