This large-scale study characterizes the algebraic learning of a cohort of nearly 800 French students during the last year of middle school (9th grade, 14-15 years old) and examines their evolution in relation to the composition of the classes to which the students belong. Based on the Anthropological Theory of the Didactic (ATD), the study is…

Purpose: Jigsaw is a popular cooperative method, but its effect on students' motivation in physical education (PE) remains uncertain. The purpose of this study was to estimate this Jigsaw effect and to explore whether the type of sport taught in PE modified this effect. Method: Overall, 136 middle-school students participated in two PE sequences…

In most Western countries, girls outperform boys in academic engagement, scholastic achievement, and school completion. In the current study, researchers assessed the developmental trajectories of European French and North African French boys' (N = 549; M[subscript age] = 11.9 years) perceptions of girls' and boys' ability to succeed in school.…

Purpose: This paper aims to examine whether the instructional message used to introduce game-based learning (GBL), prior knowledge, flow and prior gaming experience have an impact on secondary students' learning outcomes, perceived game utility and motivation to use the game. Design/methodology/approach: Fifty-four 9th grades students enrolled in…

This article investigates the effect of private lower secondary schools on student achievement in France. I use propensity score matching on a large French database to estimate the effect of enrollment in a private school on academic achievement as measured by ninth-grade test scores in three school subjects. I find that private school attendance…

Revisions in writing aim at text improvement. Literature has shown that revision activity differs between novice and experienced writers. Our ultimate goal is to understand how children and adolescents develop the capacity to shift perspectives from language producer to language recipient -- a prerequisite ability to successful revision. In this…

Reading difficulties in school are very challenging for teachers due to many different reader subtypes in one and the same class. Moreover, there are few easy-to-use tools enabling teachers to assess reading ability. According to the Simple View of Reading (Hoover and Gough in "Reading and Writing", 2(2), 127-160, 1990), efficient…

Video games are a very common leisure activity among teenagers and the aim of this study is to analyse their relations with cognitive and school performances. This study is part of a broad survey, conducted on 27,000 French teenagers (14.5 years old) in middle school (9th grade). The survey contained both a questionnaire on leisure activities…

Research has suggested mixed results regarding the relations between dimensions of ethnic-racial identity (ERI) and academic outcomes. Furthermore, little scholarship has explored the mechanisms that underlie these relations. In the current study, we investigated the longitudinal relations of 2 dimensions of ERI (embedded achievement, and ethnic…

This article presents two studies investigating the role of executive functioning in written text comprehension in children and adolescents. In a first study, the involvement of executive functions in reading comprehension performance was examined in normally developing children in fifth grade. Two aspects of text comprehension were…