It is desirable that children engage in reading and writing beyond school. What is known about various individual and environmental variables that may be related to children's leisure reading and writing? And how strong is existing evidence? Our scoping review aims at mapping research on leisure reading and writing in first- to fourth-graders.…

Early attention skills have been found to be a significant and consistent predictor of academic outcomes, grades, and achievement results (Rabiner et al., "School Psychology Review," 45(2), 250-267, 2016; Rhoades et al., "Early Childhood Research Quarterly," 26(2), 182-191, 2011). A significant portion of students in elementary…

This highly practical reference is organized around the problem behaviors that K-6 teachers see as the greatest barriers to student success--and the positive behaviors they value the most. Of particular value to educators, the book matches proven intervention techniques to specific target behaviors. Hill M. Walker presents exemplary strategies for…

Highly effective elementary teachers faced challenges to professional development which differed from their urban or suburban peers. With the increasing need for student proficiency in reading, strategies to help grow their engagement and motivation were necessary to investigate and apply to instructional habits. The purpose of this basic…

This mixed-methods research study focuses on students', teachers', and parents' perceptions of the influence therapy dogs in schools can have on reluctant readers' attitudes about reading and motivation to read at school and at home as well as exploring changes in the participants' oral fluency. Eight student participants read to our school…

The present study examined the academic antecedents of declining peer social status. Participants included 545 (311 boys, 234 girls) Finnish students followed from the 1st through the 4th grade (ages 6-8 at outset). Each year, teachers completed assessments of academic task avoidance and students completed standardized measures of reading and math…

Among the many impacts of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, one of the most dramatic was the immediate closure of in-person schooling in March/April 2020 when parents were faced with much greater responsibility in supporting their children's learning. Despite this, few studies have examined parents' own perspectives of this experience.…

The current study was part of a larger project which examined teachers' classroom practices and relationships with students' learning engagement in primary-school education in Estonia. The focus was the role of autonomy supportive and structured teaching on learning engagement. Two primary-school teachers and their 46 students were selected for…

The purpose of this study is to examine the motivation type preferences of students in kindergartens and second, fourth, sixth, and eighth grades and the underlying reasons thereof after successfully completing a mathematics task. The students in the study solved an easy mathematics question. After they solved the problem, they were presented with…

In achievement testing we assume that students will demonstrate their maximum performance as they encounter test items. Sometimes, however, student performance can decline during a test event, which implies that the test score does not represent maximum performance. This study describes a method for identifying significant performance decline and…

Educational robotics are commonly present in kindergarten and primary school classrooms, particularly Bee-bot. Its ease of use allows the introduction of computer programming to young children in educational contexts from a science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM) perspective. Despite this rise, there are still few…

Background: It is often argued that the negative development of intrinsic motivation in elementary school strongly depends on the presence of school grades because grades represent extrinsic consequences and achievement feedback that are supposed to influence intrinsically motivated behaviour. However, only a few studies have tested this…

This study was conducted to identify teachers' and students' perceptions regarding the internal factors that influence English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learning in the southern region of Ecuador. The participants were 257 children, who answered a questionnaire about motivation, anxiety, willingness, self-efficacy and memorization when learning…

The Academic Competence Evaluation Scales (ACES; DiPerna and Elliott in School Psychol Rev 31(3):293, 2002) is a 73-item teacher rating scale that assesses academic skills and enablers. The ACES Short Form (ASF) is a newly extracted 32-item short form of the ACES that has promising psychometric properties (Anthony and DiPerna in School Psychol Q…

Demographic information often proves useful for finding subpopulations in educational data. Unfortunately, it is often not collected in the log files of online learning systems, which serve as one of the primary sources of data for the Educational Data Mining community. Recent work has sought to address this issue by investigating school-level…