Middle school students in Nova Scotia, Canada, are perceived to have low self-efficacy for achieving learning outcomes. While strong self-efficacy beliefs, developed through effective curricula, have been linked to improved academic performance, there is a need for formal evaluation of such curricula. The purpose of this study was to investigate a…

A current trend in kindness research is to assess the effect of being kind on participants' well-being. To do this, participants are asked to complete a series of kind acts and the corresponding impact on their well-being is measured. As participation in school-based interventions can vary, the aim of the current study was to assess the extent of…

This study explored the effects of learner response systems (clickers) on the development of vocabulary knowledge in English (L2). Sixty-one Grade 8 learners divided in two groups participated in the experiment, which followed a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest research design. While the experimental group received a clicker-based treatment via…

This study addressed computer-supported collaborative scientific inquiries in remote networked schools (Quebec, Canada). Three dyads of Grade 5-6 classrooms from remote locations across the province collaborated using the knowledge-building tool Knowledge Forum. Customized scaffold supports embedded in the online tool were used to support student…

School-based substance use prevention programs are a common method to approaching drug use in youths. Project SOS is a single-session drug prevention program developed by police officers and delivered by elite junior hockey players to students in grades 6 and 7. The current study evaluates the effects of Project SOS at achieving its objectives of…

This article recounts three studies that portray an evolution from research examining the effects of researcher-designed instructional interventions to research examining the impact of helping teachers to design their own instructional interventions. Study 1 investigated the effects of an instructional treatment designed by the research team on…

Argument writing is challenging for elementary students. Previous experimental research has focused on scaffolding rhetorical goals, leaving content goals relatively unexplored. In a randomized experiment, 73 students in grades 5, 6, and 7 wrote persuasive texts about difficult-to-classify vertebrates. Each student received one of three sets of…

While today's schools in several countries, like Canada, are about to bring back programming to their curricula, a new conceptual angle, namely one of computational thinking, draws attention of researchers. In order to understand the articulation between computational thinking tasks in one side, student's targeted skills, and the types of problems…

While advances in game-based learning are already transforming educative practices globally, with tech giants like Microsoft, Apple and Google taking notice and investing in educational game initiatives, there is a concurrent and critically important development that focuses on "game construction" pedagogy as a vehicle for enhancing…

This study explores a student mentoring program called the Wiz Kidz, located within a Canadian urban elementary school of 420 students. The Wiz Kidz participants, their teachers and parents, and a student comparison group provided data on student connectedness to school, peers, and teachers. Overall findings suggest the students involved in the…

Although youth-led programs (YLP) have been successful in many areas of public health, youth leadership is rarely used in the prevention of peer aggression. A YLP to reduce bullying, sexual harassment, and dating aggression was compared experimentally with the board-mandated usual practice (UP). Four middle schools in an urban Canadian school…

With just a few materials, building a paper model of the International Space Station (ISS) can become an excellent group, troop, or class project. This publication contains a brief overview of the ISS, its parts, the science that occurs on board, instructions, and extensions for an interdisciplinary technology experience. Discover more about the…

The objective of the present study was to develop a scale that is appropriate for use internationally to measure affective, behavioral, and cognitive dimensions of student engagement. Psychometric properties of this scale were examined with data of 3,420 students (7th, 8th, and 9th grade) from 12 countries (Austria, Canada, China, Cyprus, Estonia,…

In this research, parents and children participated in a comprehensive book reading intervention designed to improve children's literacy. Over eight weeks during the summer, children in the intervention condition were encouraged to read one book weekly and parents were trained to foster reading comprehension. Forty-eight Grades 3 and 5 children…

Video podcasts allow students to control when, where, and what they learn, as well as the pace of learning. Considerable research has been conducted in higher education on video podcast use, but not in middle schools (grades six to eight). This study investigated the use of worked example video podcasts in mathematics classrooms with students 11…