The world is changing: both a conventional and a vaccine passport are now needed to travel internationally. Mask mandates, and social distancing are the new norm in a rapidly changing society. These measures were put in place to control the spread of the highly infectious and often fatal COVID-19, caused by a viral agent, a microorganism, a…

Automaticity in word recognition has been hypothesized to be important in reading development (LaBerge & Samuels, 1974; Perfetti, 1985). However, when predicting educational outcomes, it is difficult to isolate the influence of automatic word recognition from factors such as processing speed or knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences.…

Background: Prior studies examining the sleep of adolescents with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have relied on mean values such as average sleep duration, which masks intraindividual variability. The objective was to investigate whether adolescents with ADHD have greater intraindividual variability of sleep/wake…

There have been some behavioral indicators and some types of task performance that suggest greater creativity in students with attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD). This evidence would appear counterintuitive given that lower working memory (i.e., holding information in mind for novel recombinations) has often been documented in students…

Increased access to algebra was a focal point of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel's 2008 report on improving mathematics learning in the United States. Past research found positive effects for early access to algebra, but the focus on average effects may mask important variation across student subgroups. The author addresses whether these…

This study investigated the use of text-message abbreviations (textisms) in Australian adolescents and young adults, and relations between textism use and literacy abilities. Fifty-two high school students aged 13-15 years, and 53 undergraduates aged 18-24 years, all users of predictive texting, translated conventional English sentences into…

This study examined the nature and prevalence of electronic bullying and victimization in a sample of middle school students in a southeastern USA school. Relationships among measures of electronic bullying and victimization and global and domain-specific life satisfaction were also investigated. A total of 855 7th and 8th grade US students…

New findings are presented for children in Grades 1 to 9 who qualified their families for a multigenerational family genetics study of dyslexia (impaired word decoding/spelling) who had either superior verbal reasoning ("n" = 33 at or above 1 2/3 standard deviation, superior or better range; 19% of these children) or average verbal…

Efforts to promote academic achievement by increasing access to courses, especially in mathematics, may mask educational disparities if variations in curriculum are not also monitored. A multi-dimensional description of students' mathematics curricula during high school was obtained from analyses of surveys, transcripts, and textbooks collected…

The Jolly Green Giant. Robin Hood. The Bamberg Cathedral. Tales of King Arthur. Ecology. What do they have in common? What legends and ancient myths are shrouded in the tales of the Green Man? Most often perceived as an ancient Celtic symbol as the god of spring and summer, the Green Man disappears and returns year after year, century after…

The purposes of this study were to (1) investigate non-accelerated middle schools students' understanding of pre-algebraic concepts, in particular, addition and subtraction of integers and the notion of equality; (2) describe and analyze how non-accelerated middle school students interact with The Geometer's Sketchpad (GSP) applets depicting…

Using data from a nationwide, large-scale experimental study of the effects of a connected classroom technology on student learning in algebra (Owens et al., 2004), this dissertation focuses on challenges that can arise in estimating treatment effects in educational field experiments when samples are highly heterogeneous in terms of various…