The benefits of involvement in early childhood education have been researched from many different perspectives to show how children achieve social, emotional, and academic gains when they participate in a pre-kindergarten program. The purpose of this non-experimental quantitative study was to assess how attending a pre-kindergarten program in a…

Beginning learners of English progress through the same stages to acquire language. However, the length of time each student spends at a particular stage may vary greatly. Under the current educational policies, ELL students are expected to participate in the general education curriculum while developing their proficiency in the English language.…

A growing body of research indicates that self-control is critical to academic success. Surprisingly little is known, however, about the diverse strategies students use to implement self-control or how well these strategies work. To address these issues, the author conducted a naturalistic investigation of self-control strategies (Study 1) and 2…

Over the last decade, accountability reform has been at the forefront of the domestic policy agenda. Although the Obama Administration was critical of some elements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), its policies endorsed high-stakes testing and expanded the scope of the stakes. With the Race to the Top and an NCLB waiver process, the administration…

Purpose/Objectives: This study investigated the use of electronic and paper-based point-of-service (POS) systems in school nutrition programs (SNPs), including associated challenges and the desired skills and existing training practices for personnel handling such systems. Methods: A questionnaire was developed based on interviews with 25 SNP…

Experimental and observational research often involves asking consumers to self-report the impact of some proposed option. Because self-reported responses involve no consequence to the respondent for falsely revealing how he or she feels about an issue, self-reports may be subject to social desirability and other influences that bias responses in…

Recent research on annual growth measured using curriculum-based measurement (CBM) indicates that growth may not be linear across the year and instead varies across semesters. Numerous studies in reading have confirmed this phenomenon with only one study of math computation yielding a similar finding. This study further investigated the presence…

Situated cognition theory describes the context of a learning activity's effect on learner's cognition. In this paper, we use situated cognition theory to examine the effect of product dissection on product redesign activities. Two specific research questions are addressed: 1) Does situated cognition, in the form of product dissection, improve…

In a classroom experiment during the first week of an introductory psychology course, randomly assigned students received a pretest and then a brief training on the definitions of general-vocabulary words either related (e.g., "facilitation") or unrelated (e.g., "rendition") to 16 technical terms (e.g., "social…

In this study, we investigated the effects of mindfulness training with 23 pre-service teachers. Subjects were assigned to either a six-week mindfulness training program or a control condition. Postintervention, mindfulness participants reported greater emotional clarity and improved regulation of negative emotions. In particular, the mindfulness…

The purpose of this non-experimental quantitative study was to investigate the relationship between Pennsylvania's Classroom Diagnostic Tools (CDT) interim assessments and the state-mandated Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) and to create linear regression equations that could be used as models to predict student performance on the…

When learning verb meanings, learners capitalize on universal linguistic correspondences between syntactic and semantic structure. For instance, upon hearing the transitive sentence "the boy is glorping the girl," 2-year-olds prefer a two-participant event (e.g., a boy making a girl spin) over two simultaneous one-participant events (a…

Employing descriptive and interpretive analyses of classroom videos and focus group data, this study details how the provision of choice was enacted in instruction, and the subsequent messages students perceived. Participants included six teachers (fourth to eighth grade) and 114 students (age X-bar = 11.28 years, 60% African American). Survey…

During the first year of life, infants spend substantial amounts of time exploring objects they encounter in their daily environments. Perceptuo-motor information gained through these experiences provides a foundation for later developmental advances in cognition and language. This study aims to examine developmental trajectories of visual, oral,…

This study examined the independent and mediated associations between maternal depression symptoms (MDS), mother-child interaction, and child executive function (EF) in a prospective longitudinal sample of 1,037 children (50% boys) from predominantly low-income and rural communities. When children were 6, 15 and 24 months of age, mothers reported…