Effects of peer response using instruction in genre knowledge on the writing of 140 sixth-grade students are investigated. In one condition students were taught specific genre knowledge involving functions of linguistic indicators of time and place. In another condition students were taught more general aspects of communicative writing. Both…

The number of bi-ethnic children is increasing. The focus of this study is on bi-ethnic students in the Netherlands with one parent with an ethnic majority background and one parent with an ethnic minority background. Most studies that have investigated educational outcomes and social functioning in school for bi-ethnic students have not focused…

The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between teacher perceptions and children's reading motivation, with specific attention to gender differences. The reading self-concept, task value, and attitude of 160 fifth and sixth graders were measured. Teachers rated each student's reading comprehension. Results showed that for boys,…

The purpose of this study was to examine the directionality of the relationship between text reading prosody and reading comprehension in the upper grades of primary school. We compared 3 theoretical possibilities: Two unidirectional relations from text reading prosody to reading comprehension and from reading comprehension to text reading prosody…

Writing down spoken number words (transcoding) is an ability that is predictive of math performance and related to working memory ability. We analysed these relationships in a large sample of over 25,000 children, from kindergarten to the end of primary school, who solved transcoding items with a computer adaptive system. Furthermore, we…

It is often argued that enhancement of self-beliefs should be one of the key goals of education. However, very little is known about the relation between self-beliefs and performance when students move from primary to secondary school in highly differentiated educational systems with early tracking. This large-scale longitudinal cohort study…

While both outsiders and defenders have antibullying attitudes, only defenders have the reputation to defend victims. However, outsiders--despite their reputation of avoiding involvement in bullying--do receive some defender nominations and thus defend victims at least occasionally. This study investigated the relationship between these behavioral…

This study examines the effects of general educational quality of schools, school citizenship policy, and ethnic homogeneity of the student body on the acquisition of citizenship competences in the final year of primary education. The theoretical framework is based on developmental, psychological, and sociological studies into effects of social…

Bullying is a problem in many schools around the world. It is seen as an unwanted phenomenon in education and in many contexts the reduction of bullying is a target of national and local education policy. In practice, the extent to which bullying occurs differs widely across classrooms. Part of these differences may be explained by teachers'…

This study investigated personality correlates of early adolescents' tendency to either defend victims of bullying or to avoid involvement in bullying situations. Participants were 591 Dutch fifth- and sixth-grade students (X-bar[subscript age] = 11.42 years). Hierarchical regression models were run to predict these students' peer-reported…

The present study examined teachers' domain-specific self-efficacy (TSE) in relation to individual students with a variety of social-emotional behaviors in class. Using a sample of 526 third- to sixth-grade students and 69 teachers, multilevel modeling was conducted to examine students' externalizing, internalizing, and prosocial behaviors as…

The purpose of this study was to identify and validate subtypes of peer status by integrating preference and popularity into a single framework. Person-oriented analyses were performed among 3,630 children and adolescents of different cohorts in primary and secondary education. In the young age groups (Grade 3/4 to Grade 7), three clusters were…

The present study aims to contribute to the understanding of the effects of music education, in particular music composition as a classroom activity for fifth- and sixth-graders. The intervention (experimental condition) focused on a three-step-model for music composition, based on the Cultural Historical Activity Theory of education, and has been…

Despite its importance in social development, social understanding has hardly been studied in high-ability children. This study explores differences in social understanding between children in high-ability and regular classrooms, specifically theory of mind (ToM) and perception accuracy, as well as associations between individual characteristics…

The theory of triarchic intelligence posits that, in addition to the widely acknowledged analytical reasoning abilities, creative and practical abilities should be included in the assessments of intellectual capacities and identification of gifted students. To find support for such an approach, the present study examined the psychometric…