To be successful in a high-stakes testing situation is desirable for any test taker. It has been found that, beside content knowledge, test-taking behavior, such as risk-taking strategies, motivation, and test anxiety, is important for test performance. The purposes of the present study were to identify and group test takers with similar patterns…

This study explored the development of Ecuadorian Kindergartners' spontaneous focusing on numerosity (SFON) during the kindergarten year, as well as the contribution of early numerical abilities to this development. One hundred Kindergartners coming from ten classrooms received two SFON tasks, one at the beginning and one at the end of the school…

Students' individual learning is supposed to be based on cognitive and social processes. Therefore, students' social skills are assumed to play an important role for school performance. This study set out to investigate the links between students' peer relations skills and assertion skills and their grades for written performances and oral…

Historical reasoning competencies play an important role in history education. However, valid and reliable large-scale measurement instruments to assess these competencies are scarce. This study considers two instruments for measuring students' ability to perform historical perspective taking (HPT) as a historical reasoning competency. The…

Elementary schools in many countries record an unequal representation of male and female teachers with female teachers in huge majority. At the same time, numerous studies reveal that girls generally outmatch boys in the majority of school subjects. Consequently, possible effects of teacher-pupil gender interaction are becoming an important topic…

This study analysed the effects of the nonverbal behaviour of an examiner on low and high achievers' psychometric performances. The examiner, who was blind to children's achievement level, varied the nonverbal style she adopted when giving instructions. As expected, a warm style led children to score higher than a neutral one. Moreover, warmth…

The aim of this article is to gain further insight into the determinants of scholastic judgments. On the basis of a previous study (Dompnier, Pansu, & Bressoux, 2006), we propose a model of the processes underlying teachers' judgments. In addition to taking into account some of these determinants, the proposed model grants to pupils' social…