By focusing on 179 elementary school children, the present cross-sectional questionnaire study aimed to examine gender and immigrant-native differences in competence and affect self-concepts as well as academic achievement and the relations of those two self-concept components to academic achievement in the domains of mathematics and German.…

Learning strategies can be powerful learning tools. Some studies show that even primary school students use them. However, hardly any studies have investigated the use of learning strategies of students with special needs, especially for those with emotional and behavioural disorders, in primary schools. Thus, in the present study we examined…

The increasing number of students who lack proficient reading skills is well known in Germany, as well as globally. Students with learning disabilities (LD), problem behavior, and German as a second language (L2) may face even greater hurdles. However, it is essential for teachers to provide adequate support to maintain equal educational…

The topic of keeping livestock is very well suited to addressing the ecological, social, and economic aspects of the sustainable production of our food in school lessons. However, the production of animal-based foods is mainly outside the personal experience of children and young people. To derive relevant implications for teaching, this paper…

Achievement emotions have received increasing attention in research on adolescence and young adulthood, but little is known about these emotions in the early years of schooling. Studies addressing the development of different achievement emotions and their linkages with achievement during these years are largely lacking. The present longitudinal…

Research has shown that a profound place value understanding is crucial for success in learning mathematics. At the same time, a substantial number of students struggles with developing a sustainable place value understanding. In this regard, two aspects of the place value system appear especially relevant: First, the knowledge of the decimal…

Differentiation hypotheses concern changes in the structural organization of cognitive abilities that depend on the level of general intelligence (ability differentiation) or age (developmental differentiation). Part 1 of this article presents a review of the literature on ability and developmental differentiation effects in children, revealing…

In most general education classrooms in Germany, students with and without special educational needs are taught together. To support teachers in adapting instruction to these heterogeneous classrooms, we have developed learning progress assessment (LPA) and reading instructional materials, the "Reading Sportsman" (RS), in line with the…

This study investigated the enjoyment, boredom, and anxiety of elementary school students and the relations of these emotions with achievement in two domains. Seven-hundred-and-sixty-seven second- and fourth-graders completed an adaptation of the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire-Elementary School (AEQ-ES: Lichtenfeld, Pekrun, Stupnisky, Reiss,…

In our current culture, children are exposed to a huge amount of audiovisual media, of which many formats include animated pictures, such as in videos, for instance. The current study addresses the use of audiovisual media in order to increase the effectiveness of learning and teaching. We examined how auditory text, audiovisual text with static…

Previous research findings indicate that young children from East Asia outperform their counterparts from Europe and North America on executive function (EF) tasks. However, very few cross-national studies have focused on EF development during middle childhood. The current study assessed the EF performance of 170 children in grades 2 and 4 from…

In contrast to classical phonological span tasks, which require verbal recall, those used in self-reliant, group-administrable working memory measurement contain a visuospatial response format. As a consequence, these tasks involve recoding, executive, and visual search requirements in addition to encoding and storage processes. To examine…

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…

In line with the reciprocal internal/external frame of reference model (RI/E model), it is well-established that secondary school students generate domain-specific ability self-concepts by comparing their own performance in a domain socially (i.e., with others' performance in this domain) and dimensionally (i.e., with their own performance in…

Though it is well-established that self-esteem develops from childhood well into old age, little is known about the processes that influence this change, especially among young populations. This international, cross-sequential study examined the development of self-esteem in 1599 second-graders (Age M[subscript T1] = 7.99, SD[subscript T1] = 0.52…