This report uses data from the National Literacy Trust's 2019 Annual Literacy Survey and the Great School Library Campaign to determine how many schools in the UK have had a writer visit in the last year, their reasons for organising the visit, and the relationship the visit had with children and young people's engagement with reading and writing.…

The current research explores young adults' beliefs, awareness and understanding surrounding help-seeking behaviour in relation to barriers preventing access to counselling support. The literature suggests that several barriers, such as a lack of awareness, stigma and gender roles, will have a negative influence on help-seeking. To complement and…

Parent-child interaction plays a crucial role in early language acquisition. In young typically developing children, direct and indirect relationships between parent gesture, child gesture and child language have been observed. Far less is known about these relationships in atypical language development. The present study investigated parent…

Disambiguation refers to children's tendency to assign novel labels to unfamiliar rather than familiar referents. It is employed as a word-learning strategy, but it remains unknown whether it is a domain-specific phenomenon or a manifestation of more general pragmatic competence. To assess the domain-specificity and development of disambiguation,…

A community sample of 192 parents reported on their children's restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRBs) at mean ages 15 months (N = 138), 26 months (N = 191), and 77 months (N = 125) using the Repetitive Behavior Questionnaire-2 (RBQ-2). Consistent with previous factor analytic research, 2 factors were found at each age: 1 comprising repetitive…

This study used grounded theory methodology to investigate whether learning in a problem-based learning (PBL) group was influenced by student demographic diversity. Data comprised observations, in the form of video footage, of one first-year PBL group carried out over the period of an academic year, along with student interviews. Using the…

This study examined age differences in young people's understanding of evolution theory in secondary school. A second aim of this study was to propose a new coding scheme that more accurately described students' conceptual understanding about evolutionary theory. We argue that coding schemes adopted in previous research may have overestimated…

Extant literature has established a consistent association between aspects of reading motivation, such as enjoyment and self-perceived ability, and reading achievement, in that more motivated readers are generally more skilled readers. However, the developmental etiology of this relation is yet to be investigated. The present study explores the…

We used pupil-level data from the National Pupil Database in England to conduct a longitudinal analysis of the identification of moderate learning difficulties (MLD) and social, emotional, and mental health difficulties (SEMH) among 550,000 pupils ages 5 to 11 years. Survival analysis was used to determine the hazard ratios (HRs) for time to first…

This study tested the association between multiple prenatal and postnatal early life factors and adolescent sexual orientation in a longitudinal birth cohort. Factors included birth weight, gestational age, parental age at birth, number of older brothers and sisters, breastfeeding, maternal anxiety/depression, family socioeconomic position,…

The provision for every pupil in schools of one-to-one digital devices such as tablets and laptops is claimed to offer a range of benefits, both practical and educational. Opinions are still divided as to whether the benefits for teaching and learning in fact outweigh the cost, disruption to established teaching practice, and distraction for…

To celebrate Blue Peter turning 60, we took a closer look at children and young people's letter writing in 2017/18, exploring how many children write letters in their free time, how often children write letters, and why children decide to write, or not write, letters. Our report is based on the responses of 42,363 pupils aged 8 to 18 who answered…

Young people in theory have a world filled with opportunity and longer lives to enjoy it. But for too many these opportunities are out of reach. Educational attainment is increasingly central to life chances, but more dependent on family background here than in other countries. Rises in insecure work along with stalled pay risk further divides…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study relative age effects (RAEs) in a selected sample of university students. The majority of education systems across the globe adopt age-related cut-off points for eligibility. This strategy has received criticism for (dis)advantaging those older children born closer to the "cut-off" date for…

Clinical initiatives have aimed to reduce the age at ASD diagnosis in the UK. This study investigated whether the median age at diagnosis in childhood has reduced in recent years, and identified the factors associated with earlier diagnosis in the UK. Data on 2,134 children with ASD came from two large family databases. Results showed that the age…