School connectedness is important for students' current and future outcomes but may decline in the middle school years. This mixed methods study investigated the impact of a school garden project on 6th-graders' school connectedness. Surveys were completed by 46 middle school students at the beginning and end of a garden unit. In addition,…

The purpose of this study was to explore how teacherpractitioners in a Canadian middle school perceive students' experiences of well-being in student-led service learning projects (SLPs). Through semistructured interviews, we explored five school practitioners' accounts of how SLPs contributed to student relating and functioning in a well-being…

This study examined the relation between both implementation fidelity and quality and the outcomes of two different anti-bullying interventions targeting distinct processes involved in bullying: moral disengagement and social norms. In total, 34 French-speaking Belgian teachers from six elementary schools were trained to deliver either the moral…

This study examined relations of affinity for solitude with social-behavioral, academic, and psychological adjustment in Chinese children and adolescents. The participants included 3,417 students (1,714 boys) in fourth, sixth, and eighth grades (M[subscript ages] = 10, 12, and 14 years, respectively) in China. Data on affinity for solitude were…

Scholars and practitioners have called for personalized and widely accessible professional development (PD) for teachers. Yet, a long-standing tension between customizing support and increasing access to such support has hindered the scale-up of high-quality PD for individual teachers. This study addresses this challenge by developing a…

Understanding the role of metacognitive judgements in science learning can significantly contribute to the qualification of both teaching and learning processes. We present some of the existing relationships between two important theoretical categories in education: metacognitive judgements and cellular theory learning. The research was conducted…

Understanding motivational beliefs such as expectancy and value that shape students' persistence and decision to pursue a STEM career, obtaining valid and reliable measures for these dimensions, and developing strategies using this data are critically important to ensure students' persistence in the STEM pipeline. Therefore, this study aims to…

Primary-secondary school transitions are widely recognised as pivotal developmental periods, which can have positive and negative longitudinal implications on the education, wellbeing and mental health of children. Yet few studies have sought the voice of children through interviews, and especially children in receipt of pupil premium funding…

Previous research examining comparison relations in word problems primarily focused on students' achievements in word problems with one operation. In this paper, we extend previous research to examine the achievement of students of different ages on word problems that integrate compare and combine word problems, hereafter referred to as…

The purpose of this study was to investigate if a group of sixth-grade low achievement language minority (LM) students' reading skills could be improved by an intervention designed to train reading fluency, a critical component of reading development, defined as integrating speed and accuracy (reading rate) as well as prosody. The study included…

National and local data show that many female students lose interest in STEM at an early age, female students that remain interested in STEM show partiality for life sciences. This results in gender stratification in STEM subject areas and is evident in high school enrollments in elective courses. This three-manuscript dissertation investigates…

Secondary course assignment substantially determines a teacher's day-to-day work life, incentivizing them to realize their personal desires, which prior work shows tend to be working with more advanced students. Teachers have varying abilities to enact these desires, potentially due to their political capital, which is largely influenced by…

This study investigates children's perceptions of environmental change and their connection to nature in Mexico's Mediterranean region, an area of global ecological significance. We used a convergent mixed methods design to analyze data from 392 fourth through sixth graders from urban, peri-urban, and rural schools. Integrating quantitative and…

Growth mindset has been shown to predict academic achievement in a variety of student populations, though the strength of the relationship can vary depending on the characteristics of the students examined. Using a large-scale sample of middle school students from a diverse district in the United States, we examine how multiple facets of students'…

The increasing cultural diversity in host society schools highlights the need to better understand the conditions supporting the integration of students with an immigrant background. This study examines whether peer acceptance enhances the association between student-teacher relationship closeness and classroom emotional engagement, and whether…