Objective: Sport is an important source of physical, social and emotional health and well-being among children. Sports participation at school may provide young people with the opportunity to build interpersonal skills and develop supportive social relationships with peers and adults, which may translate to positive experiences during the school…

The overall purpose of this dissertation was to examine how school climate, leadership, and teachers' belief systems are interrelated and how they jointly influence teachers' classroom practices and students' learning and development. This dissertation is structured as follows. In chapter 1, the overarching themes of the dissertation are…

Gifted students have unique characteristics and these characteristics influence their learning styles and dispositions towards learning. The purpose of this study is to examine gifted students' learning styles and to understand how gifted students articulate learning. In this convergent parallel mixed methods study, 106 (n = 106) students…

Developing student interest is critical to supporting student learning in computer science. Research indicates that student interest is a key predictor of persistence and achievement. While there is a growing body of work on developing computing identities for diverse students, little research focuses on early exposure to develop multilingual…

This study examines the feasibility of adding a proximal outcome survey to a book distribution program. We also examine access to books at home for Grade 3 to 5 students experiencing poverty and relations with reading motivation and reading amount. Finally, we describe students' book preferences by analyzing the difficulty and genres of texts they…

STEM family e-learning involves increasing the engagement in STEM home learning activities. STEM home learning activities range from exploring subjects such as science technology, engineering, and maths through a fun play based K-6 STEM curriculum. The family are trained to act as teachers, mentors, and coaches to the K-6 members. Families from…

This study examined variations in the development of classroom aggression popularity norms, as well as the role of homeroom teachers' aggression beliefs and students' perceptions of teachers' support as predictors of such variations. To achieve this goal, a sample of 63 classrooms were assessed at four time points during a school year, in nine…

Even though mental health has continued to move to the forefront of the public attention, there continues to be a resistance in recognition of a mental health concern, and treatment for certain mental health conditions or disorders by the majority of adolescents and youth that are not seeking treatment. The purpose of this qualitative multiple…

This paper draws from a broader research project and reports on a qualitative case study that investigated instructional practices in grades 3-5 Two-Way Immersion (TWI) classrooms where the partner language is Spanish. Using Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) as the theoretical framework, the purpose of this study was to examine the degree to…

The current conditions in Indonesia show that student activities in the learning process tend to be passive which impacts factual knowledge. This study aims to analyze the effectiveness of concrete media in improving students' factual knowledge through observing activities. This study was quasi-experimental, designed in a non-equivalent post with…

Previous studies on students' conceptions of learning science (COLS) have focused primarily on formal environments. In these studies, students' COLS were positively associated with their approaches to and outcomes for science learning. However, little research has been conducted to explore students' conceptions of learning science in informal…

This study identifies various approaches to optimizing school-family collaboration to enhance pupils' performance. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship and potential influences regarding the dimensions of: i) family functioning, ii) parent-teacher relationship, and iii) various parent involvement approaches to improve…

In TIMSS 2015, while two-thirds of students in grade 4 reported feeling very safe at school, by grade 8, less than half of the students surveyed reported feeling a high level of safety. Overall, girls were more likely to report feeling safe than boys. For both genders, feeling safe at school seemed to be positively related to academic achievement…

This study evaluated the comparative effects of presession and interspersed attention on the disruptive behavior of an at-risk student in an inclusive fourth-grade classroom. Data indicated a decrease in disruptive behavior during both presession and interspersed attention conditions with the interspersed condition producing the lower level.…

Background: Creativity is an important ability for problem-solving in both personal life and academic learning. Few creativity studies have investigated the development of children's creativity in disadvantaged rural areas or compared the rural-urban differences through digital game-based creativity learning. Understanding such differences can…