To help explain the differences in students' performance on internationally administered science assessments, cross-national, video-based observational studies have been advocated, but none have yet been conducted at the elementary level for science. The USA and Germany are two countries with large formal education systems whose students…

Sex education refers to people's comprehension about sex, which involves not only sexual structure (anatomy, physiology, birth control, pregnancy, etc.), but also sexual relationships concerning human and moral problems. It includes at least sexual physiology, sexual psychology, sexual ethic, sexual law, etc., which aims to help people form the…

Introduction: This article, based on a study of 196 teachers of students with visual impairments, reports on the experiences with and opinions related to their decisions about instructing their students who are blind or have low vision in the abacus. Methods: The participants completed an online survey on how they decide which students should be…

This paper reports a study that examines the integration of tablet technologies such as iPads into literacy lessons to investigate how reading and meaning-making occur within this digital medium. Specifically in this paper, we discuss the concept of reading paths as applied to physical and cognitive planes of meaning-making. The paper reports on…

This article examined the ability of young children to adapt their trust in testimony in relation to the strength of their prior knowledge across 2 cultures and 2 age groups. Kindergartners and second graders in the United States and Hong Kong (N = 128) viewed pictures of objects and made category judgments about each object: first, in the…

The phenomenon of summer slide or setback has gained a great deal of attention in the USA. It is understood to account for as much as 80% of the difference in achievement for students between low and high socio-economic families over their elementary schooling. In a mixed method longitudinal study of reforms in low socio-economic school…

In 19 (sub)samples from seven countries (United States, Austria, Germany, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Vietnam, Brazil), we analyzed the impact of parental education compared with wealth on the cognitive ability of children (aged 4-22 years, total N = 15,297). The background of their families ranged from poor indigenous remote villagers to academic…

What constitutes a successful lesson? A considerable body of literature examines instructional talk; however, little attention has been directed to situations in which teacher intentions (as captured by lesson plan) are stymied by unanticipated student response and the teacher must instantaneously reevaluate and revise an intended lesson. This…

In the present study, the similarity of the factor structure of the Test Anxiety Scale for Elementary Students (TAS-E) and cultural and gender differences in test anxiety were examined in a sample of 1322 US and Singapore elementary students. The similarity of the factor structure of the TAS-E, a measure of test anxiety, was examined to determine…

In this study, the authors assessed children's ability to use information overheard in other people's conversations to judge the reality status of a novel entity. Three- to 9-year-old children (N = 101) watched video clips in which two adults conversed casually about a novel being. Videos contained statements that explicitly denied, explicitly…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of specific cognitive abilities and reading comprehension across a variety of norm referenced tests that align with Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theory of cognitive abilities and integrative models of reading. Data from existing studies was analyzed by comparing the relationships of four…

Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K)--a large, nationally representative sample of US elementary school students, we employed multilevel analysis to answer the following research questions: (a) Does students' mathematics achievement growth in grades K-3 vary among schools? (b) To what extent does…

The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) is an international comparative study of student achievement. In 2011, PIRLS was administered to nationally representative samples of 4th-grade students in 53 education systems around the world. The PIRLS assessment measures student performance on a combined reading literacy scale, as…

The present study aimed to investigate cultural construction of children's perceptions of popularity determinants using a cross-cultural approach. This study examined 327 Chinese and 312 American fifth-graders' perceptions of what individual characteristics and peer relationships would make a peer popular. Consistent with cultural emphases,…

Despite the fact that China has a deep-rooted history of sympathetic attitudes toward individuals with disabilities, and has begun to serve individuals with disabilities in their public schools, Special Education in China today is much like it was in the United States prior to the implementation of the Education for all Handicapped Children Act of…