There has been an increased focus on the tenets of implementation science in special education research, namely on the degree to which interventions are implemented as intended (i.e., fidelity of implementation) and factors that influence fidelity of implementation. For complex interventions, such as the "Self-Determined Learning Model of…

Background: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate highly variable writing skills. Few studies have examined if engagement during writing assessments may differ for children with ASD and if task engagement is related to their writing assessment performance. This study examined narrative writing and broad task engagement in…

Metacognition is a valuable tool for learning, particularly in online settings, due to its role in self-regulation. Being metacognitive is especially crucial for students who face exceptional difficulties in academic settings because it grants them the ability to identify gaps in their knowledge and seek help during difficult courses. Here we…

The current paper explores how students' relationships with their teachers, parents, and friends might differentially impact their academic experience and success, by presenting and integrating the results of two related studies. In the first study, survey methods and structural equation modeling are used to describe the similar and different…

Observed genetic associations with educational attainment may be due to direct or indirect genetic influences. Recent work highlights "genetic nurture," the potential effect of parents' genetics on their child's educational outcomes via rearing environments. To date, few mediating childhood environments have been tested. We used a large…

Objective: The objective of this study was to compare caffeine consumption in the morning, afternoon, and evening in adolescents with and without ADHD and examine associations with sleep functioning. Methods: Participants were 302 adolescents (ages 12-14) with (n=140) and without (n=162) ADHD. Adolescents wore actigraph watches to assess total…

I propose an integrative theoretical framework for reading and writing acquisition, called the interactive dynamic literacy model, after reviewing theoretical models of reading and writing, and recent efforts in integrating theoretical models within reading and writing, respectively. The central idea of the interactive dynamic literacy model is…

Early language competence is a reliable and powerful predictor of children's success in school, and word gaps linked to socioeconomic status disparities have cascading effects on academic outcomes. While early research -- such as the work of Hart and Risley (1995) -- focused on gaps in vocabulary, growing evidence reveals wide gaps in syntax as…

Immediacy is one of the necessary criteria to show strong evidence of treatment effect in single case experimental designs (SCEDs). With the exception of Natesan and Hedges (2017) no inferential statistical tool has been used to demonstrate or quantify it until now. We investigate and quantify immediacy by treating the change-points between the…

Additional to the lack of gender and ethnic diversity, the attrition rate among Physics and Engineering undergraduates is as high as 40%. Considering the impact of STEM gateway course on students' choice of major, we investigated the association between students' Expectancy-Value beliefs at the beginning of the class with their intent to persist…

The present study investigated the effects of parental monitoring, neighborhood risk, and racism experiences during early adolescence on adolescents' emotional and behavioral outcomes in high school. Five hundred twenty-two African American youth and their parents and teachers completed surveys about youth development over time. Consistent with…

Previous studies have documented that individual differences in fine and gross motor skills are associated with executive function (EF) skills. This study used an experimental design to test whether participating in cognitively challenging motor skills activities was causally related to improvements in motor skills and two key indicators of school…

The relationship between turn taking (i.e., back-and-forth preverbal communicative exchanges) and joint attention has not been studied in interactions between children with autism and caregivers. In joint attention, a form of preverbal social communication, young children socially share attention with a partner about objects, a competency that is…

This observational study used data from 270 second-grade students to investigate the association between students' strategy use for multidigit addition and subtraction and their mathematics achievement. Based on strategies they used during a mathematics interview, students were classified into the following strategy groups: (a) standard algorithm,…

Results from a genome-wide association study (GWAS) can be used to generate a polygenic score (PGS), an individual-level measure summarizing identified genetic influence on a trait dispersed across the genome. For complex, behavioral traits, the association between an individual's PGS and their phenotype may contain bias (from geographic,…