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…

This study examined the influence of a 4-month intervention on students' motivation in Grade 10 physical education and enrollment in elective physical education. Health Promoting Secondary School Physical Education (HPSS PE) was designed to improve students' psychological need satisfaction in physical education, based on self-determination theory.…

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…

Concerns persist regarding high school students' chemistry learning. Learning chemistry is challenging because of chemistry's innate complexity and the need for students to construct associations between different, yet related representations of matter and its changes. Students should be taught to reason about and consider chemical phenomena using…

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 investigated one-semester outdoor education program impact on adolescents' perceived self-authorship--the ability to form our identity independently from the expectations of external individuals and the capacity to invent our beliefs, identity, and relationships (Baxter Magolda, 1998; Kegan, 1982)--as measured by the Self-Authorship…

This study examines the effects of the pedagogical use of an interactive mobile digital game, Prêt à Négocier (PàN), on improving learners' pronunciation of French as a Second Language (FSL), using three holistic measures: comprehensibility, fluency, and overall pronunciation. Two groups of FSL learners engaged in different types of game-playing…

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…

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…

There is abundant evidence to suggest that students' achievement goals (AGs) predict their motivation and performance. While it has been proposed that psychological need satisfaction (PNS) may affect AG, empirical support remains limited during the transition to secondary school. This prospective study addresses this gap by examining the link…

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 explored secondary students' learning experiences in mathematics through digital game building. In this study, students were asked to become designers and builders in order to coauthor their own mathematics learning. Grounded in enactivism, this study examined the impact of game building on students' achievement. In addition, it…

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…