There has been a significant volume of research studying the effect of individuals' motivation on reading comprehension. The findings of previous research have demonstrated both the direct contribution of motivation to comprehension and its indirect influence through mediating effects of reading amount and strategy use. The effect of the linkage…

With a one-stage meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) analysis based on 49,416 individuals from 267 independent samples and 210 studies, the current study systematically investigated models including meta-linguistic skills, decoding, language comprehension, and reading comprehension for Chinese population. Findings showed that (1)…

Previous research findings indicate that young children from East Asia outperform their counterparts from Europe and North America on executive function (EF) tasks. However, very few cross-national studies have focused on EF development during middle childhood. The current study assessed the EF performance of 170 children in grades 2 and 4 from…

It is well-documented that academic achievement is associated with students' self-perceptions of their academic abilities, that is, their academic self-concepts. However, low-achieving students may apply self-protective strategies to maintain a favorable academic self-concept when evaluating their academic abilities. Consequently, the relation…

Principals (policy makers) have debated the progress in U.S. student performance for a half century or more. Informing these conversations, survey agents have administered seven million psychometrically linked tests in math and reading in 160 waves to national probability samples of selected cohorts born between 1954 and 2007. This study is the…

In this study, we examined the intercorrelations among speech perception, metalinguistic (i.e., phonological and morphological) awareness, word reading, and vocabulary in a 1st language (L1) and a 2nd language (L2). Results from 3 age groups of Chinese-English bilingual children showed that speech perception was more predictive of reading and…

Background: Most previous studies in Western societies have demonstrated a general decline in school motivation. However, it is not clear whether motivational decline occurs uniformly for all students. The moderating effects of individual and cultural differences on students' motivational decline need to be further explored. Aims: This study aimed…

This study examines Hong Kong students' motivational beliefs, strategy use and their relations with two relational factors in classrooms--student learning community and teacher support and involvement. A total of 2206 Grade Four to Grade Nine students responded to a questionnaire that comprised three instruments, including two scales measuring…

This paper presents a field experiment examining the effect of drama education on the psychological development of grades 1 and 4 students. The drama curriculum was delivered after school for one day each week for 16 weeks. Students in the experimental group attended drama education classes, whereas students in the control group took part in the…