In education, among the most anticipated consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are that student performance will stagnate or decline and that existing inequities will increase. Although some studies suggest a decline in student performance and widening learning gaps, the picture is less clear than expected. In this study, we add to the existing…

Based on the relationships motivation theory, it can be assumed that social interactions in elementary school are essential for students' development and especially for their school success. Thus, this study examined how vital social resources, more precisely social interactions with peers and teachers, are for two central aspects of school…

Academic language and its associations with school success have been established in many prior studies. However, the scholarship lacks research on the mechanisms that constitute these relations. This study investigates the mediating role of motivational-­affective variables, specifically reading self-concept and reading enjoyment, in relations…

Based on Honneth's recognition theory, this study aimed at investigating whether students with a migration background reported receiving less recognition from teachers than students without a migration background. Also, we explored whether such a difference contributed to explaining the disparity between the groups in reading achievement. To…

Young students who speak a different language at home than that spoken in school (i.e., a minority home-language) appear to exhibit a biased reading self-concept. Importantly, this biased reading self-concept may correspond with altered causal pathways between reading self-concept and achievement in minority home-language students. To test this…

In studies of academic resilience, the concept is typically operationalized by pre-defined cutoff values of students' achievement level and their social background. A threat to the validity of such arbitrary operationalizations is that students around the cutoff values may be misclassified. The main objective of the current study is to apply a…

Research on reading achievement and reading motivation has rarely addressed the question if and how they affect each other over time. In our study, we investigate the reciprocal effects between reading achievement and both intrinsic and extrinsic reading motivation during elementary school. We measured reading achievement and intrinsic and…

Previous research has shown that parental involvement at home seems to be socio-economically stratified. To study this stratification, recent research has drawn a distinction between early and late parental literacy activities at home. Early parental literacy activities at home happen before primary school, whereas late parental literacy…

Ethnic and racial disparities in educational outcomes, such as test scores, are a core issue of educational research. While the role of student and family factors in the formation of such disparities is well established, existing studies fail to draw a similarly clear picture of how teachers contribute to ethnic and racial achievement gaps. In…

Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) often co-occur and are associated with specific learning difficulties. Robust prevalence estimations do not yet exist. We studied how symptoms of DCD and/or ADHD are related to difficulties in reading, writing, and mathematics. Using the data from a large…

Academic resilience is difficult to define in an international setting, since economic levels and achievement standards vary across countries and over time. In studies of academic resilience, the concept is typically operationalized using pre-defined cut-offs of achievement and social background. The main objective of the current study is to apply…

This study investigates consistent and inconsistent respondents to mixed-worded questionnaire scales in large-scale assessments. Mixed-worded scales contain both positively and negatively worded items and are universally applied in different survey and content areas. Due to the changing wording, these scales require a more careful reading and…

The association between academic self-concept and achievement is assumed to be reciprocal. Typically, the association is analyzed by variants of the classical cross-lagged panel model. Results with more recently developed methodological approaches, for example, the random intercept cross-lagged panel model, its continuous-time implementation, and…

Background: In the present paper, we investigated the association between time spent reading and reading comprehension throughout the lifespan. According to the Matthew effect (or rich-get-richer and poor-get-poorer) model, interindividual differences in reading-related skills between poor and average readers become wider as individuals grow…

It is well-documented that academic achievement is associated with students' self-perceptions of their academic abilities, that is, their academic self-concepts. However, low-achieving students may apply self-protective strategies to maintain a favorable academic self-concept when evaluating their academic abilities. Consequently, the relation…