In France, a quarter of pupils change schools during their elementary education. In this article, we analyse families' motives in changing schools. Using a rich longitudinal database, we distinguish different motives for mobility: strategic mobility (search for a better school), reactive mobility (due to school difficulties) and residential…

Morphological awareness has been shown to contribute to the acquisition of literacy in various languages. The current study focuses on an explicit derivational morphology training program in French-speaking fourth graders with the aim of measuring direct effects on morphological awareness and transfer effects on spelling and reading. The intensive…

Visual-verbal paired-associate learning (PAL) is thought to be related to reading acquisition and, more specifically, to word reading skills. To date, the uniqueness and strength of this relationship has remained unclear because most studies have been conducted in opaque orthographies such as English, and few studies have controlled for all of the…

Objective: This study investigated active recess as an innovative approach to improving physical activity levels in European primary schools, addressing the need to counteract sedentary behaviour and enhance health in students. Method and Design: Using rapid reviewing, the article summarises empirical evidence from a variety of sources, including…

Over the last decade, teachers in France have been increasingly pressured to use digital learning environments, and to shift from grade-based to skill-based assessment. Educational dashboards, which measure student input electronically, could foster such a transition by providing insights into learners' performances. However, such dashboards could…

This paper discusses the relevance of using physical situations to introduce the concept of angles at elementary school. We compare the effectiveness of two geometry teaching sequences. In the first one (physical sequence), the pupils learned the angle concept by experimenting on the playground (i.e. mesospace) and then modelling the situation. In…

In the teaching of natural science, field trips are a means of bringing students directly into contact with the biological and geological aspects of the environment. The present study explored French students' views of fieldwork and the relationships they establish with the natural environment as a result. We analyzed the responses of 293 primary…

Purpose: The main objective of this study was to assess the existence of developmental effects on the performance of the Vocale Rapide dans le Bruit (VRB) speech-in-noise (SIN) identification test that was recently developed for the French language and to collect reference scores for children and adolescents. Method: Seventy-two native French…

Recent research indicates that the transition from primary to secondary school is an important step in students' lives. Although this step is often expected to be even more challenging for autistic students, there are new hints that the transition could also be an opportunity and not necessarily a negative period. Sixteen autistic students in…

Purpose: Typically developing (TD) bilingual children usually produce narratives with preserved macrostructure (i.e., narrative scheme) but with impaired microstructure (i.e., language complexity). As for monolingual and bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD), they usually produce narratives with both impaired macro- and…

We studied the effect of the number and characteristics of siblings (sex, age) on school achievement in several grades (kindergarten, first grade, and fifth grade), in two large French cohorts, with more than 16,000 children. Running linear mixed-effects models, we find that, independently of socioeconomic status, having more siblings is…

This paper presents comparative information on the strength of the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and literacy skills at ages 6-8, drawing on data from France, Germany, Japan, Rotterdam (Netherlands), the United Kingdom, and the United States. We investigate whether the strength of the association between SES and literacy skills in…

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to a change in liking of a conditioned stimulus (CS) consecutive to its repeated pairing with a valent unconditioned stimulus (US). We relied on a multinomial processing tree model to compare the processes underlying EC in middle-aged children (n = 57, M[subscript age] = 8.65, range = 6.94-11.03; 31 females) and…

Learning to spell is a difficult but essential task for children learning to read. Several spelling tasks involving different cognitive demands are used in classroom. To provide better guidance for teaching practices, a critical question is whether spelling performance of beginner readers is task dependent. The present study focuses on the…

In the present study, we aimed to disentangle the impact of bilingualism and socioeconomic status (SES) on literacy in language-minority bilingual children (LMBC) and monolinguals exposed to French. We also wanted to explore the role of these two factors on cognitive and language skills, i.e., verbal knowledge (VK), morphosyntactic comprehension…