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Museums offer great potential for learning, mediated by parent–child conversations. Despite much qualitative research conducting informative observations of family museum interactions, limited experimental work has investigated how to maximize these experiences. Recent studies have begun to quantitatively examine the potential of researcher-facilitated and resource-based interventions to enhance parent–child conversation in the museum context. This meta-analysis synthesized data from all identified experimental studies in this emerging field (n = 9, k = 111). Findings suggest that museum interventions significantly improve parent–child dyadic conversations (g = .43, p < .001). Sub-analyses showed that the most successful interventions were those which targeted parents (rather than the parent–child dyad) and explicitly guided parental use of conversational strategies. Implications for practice are discussed.

Help-seeking research has traditionally inferred behavioural responses to the need for help from post-hoc reflections and experiments outside of the classroom context.We aimed to gain an ecologically valid understanding of the help-seeking process by examining the association between pupils' task-specific perceptions and their help-seeking interactions with teachers and peers during lessons.Participants were 290 pupils in Years 4-6 (aged 8.22-11.48) and 12 teachers in 12 classrooms in three schools across two local authorities in South East England, UK.The microlongitudinal data consisted of 6,592 task-specific reports. Pupils reported on their task understanding and need for help and their help-seeking (teacher and peer) and help-giving behaviours at the end of each lesson. On average, pupils completed 25.44 reports across 14.64 lessons, 13 school subjects and 4.80 days. Teachers reported on pupils' academic performance. Data were analysed using two-level logistic and multinomial logistic regressions.Task-specific understanding and need for help were associated with help-seeking and help-giving behaviour during lessons. Understanding was associated also with the type of help sought and given among classmates and appeared to influence whether pupils were help-seekers or help-givers during peer interactions. There was an apparent reciprocity in peer help-seeking interactions, occurring namely among girls and higher performers. Overall, girls were more likely than boys to seek and give help across tasks. Pupils for whom English was an additional language were less likely than classmates to seek help when they needed it. The study (1) sheds new light on the dynamics of everyday help-seeking interactions in the classroom, (2) provides a conceptual framework for researchers interested in reciprocal processes of social interaction in self-regulated learning, and (3) highlights groups who might benefit from intervention.

Since teaching is a demanding and stressful profession, the study of teachers’ physiological stress in the classroom setting is an emerging field. In cross-sectional studies self-reported stress and affect are related, but less is known about the intraindividual relations between situational physiological stress and corresponding positive and negative affect. The aim of our study was to investigate the associations between situational physiological stress (six salivary cortisol samples per day) and self-reported situational affect (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule four times a day) among 61 Finnish primary school teachers over two workdays. We present a novel multilevel structural equation model (MSEM) that includes cortisol, with time since awakening as a flexibly coded time-varying covariate and affect with time since cortisol measurement as a time-varying covariate. Higher levels of teachers’ situational physiological stress were related to lower situational positive affect (e.g., enthusiasm) and higher negative affect (e.g., nervousness), demonstrating the acute/situational effects of stress on affect. In our discussion, we emphasize the importance of the sequence of sampling and observations for further theoretical modeling of relations between stress and affect. We also propose practical implications for improving teachers’ awareness of their well-being. peerReviewed

Research has shown that teachers’ autonomy support and provision of structure relate to students’ agentic and behavioral engagement. Moreover, agentic engagement elicits higher teacher autonomy support. In the present 5-week diary study, we investigated the dynamic nature of this interplay between teachers and students through their cross-assessment of students’ agentic and behavioral engagement. We also considered the week-to-week student-reported teacher autonomy support and provision of structure as well as two student personal characteristics — proactive personality and situational autonomous versus controlled motivation. Two hundred fifty-seven Turkish middle school students and their teachers from 13 classes participated in the study. Multilevel analyses showed that students’ week-to-week perceived autonomy support and initial level of autonomous motivation positively predicted week-to-week agentic engagement (teacher- and student-reported). Students’ week-to-week perceived structure positively predicted week-to-week agentic and behavioral engagement (student-, but not teacher-, reported). These findings indicate the interplay between students’ situational engagement and teachers’ situational motivating style (i.e., autonomy support and provision of structure). They also suggest greater predictive power for students’ situational motivation over the personal trait of proactive personality.

We explore the effect of students’ perceived task difficulty on the mathematics self-efficacy – performance relationship. Specifically, we expand on previous reciprocal effects studies through including students’ self-efficacy for different levels of task difficulty in an empirical investigation. We examined students’ self-efficacy for easy, medium difficulty, and hard tasks and performance on a national mathematics test in a longitudinal study of 95 Norwegian students from grade 8 to grade 9. We found differential relationships between self-efficacy for different levels of task difficulty and national test performance. In support of the ‘skill development’ model, grade 8 national test performance predicted grade 9 self-efficacy for medium and hard, but not easy, tasks. While mastery experiences are likely to arise more easily on easier tasks, such experiences are likely to matter more on harder tasks. Our findings highlight the importance of supporting students’ engagement with challenging tasks to strengthen both their performance and self-efficacy.

Digital Voice Assistants (DVAs) have become a ubiquitous technology in today’s home and childhood environments. Inspired by (Bernstein and Crowley, J Learn Sci 17:225–247, 2008) original study (n = 60, age 4–7 years) on how children’s ontological conceptualizations of life and technology were systematically associated with their real-world exposure to robotic entities, the current study explored this association for children in their middle childhood (n = 143, age 7–11 years) and with different levels of DVA-exposure. We analyzed correlational survey data from 143 parent–child dyads who were recruited on ‘Amazon Mechanical Turk’ (MTurk). Children’s ontological conceptualization patterns of life and technology were measured by asking them to conceptualize nine prototypical organically living and technological entities (e.g., humans, cats, smartphones, DVAs) with respect to their biology, intelligence, and psychology. Their ontological conceptualization patterns were then associated with their DVA-exposure and additional control variables (e.g., children’s technological affinity, demographic/individual characteristics). Compared to biology and psychology, intelligence was a less differentiating factor for children to differentiate between organically living and technological entities. This differentiation pattern became more pronounced with technological affinity. There was some evidence that children with higher DVA-exposure differentiated more rigorously between organically living and technological entities on the basis of psychology. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study exploring children’s real-world exposure to DVAs and how it is associated with their conceptual understandings of life and technology. Findings suggest although psychological conceptualizations of technology may become more pronounced with DVA-exposure, it is far from clear such tendencies blur ontological boundaries between life and technology from children’s perspective.

Self-efficacy in mathematics is related to engagement, persistence, and academic performance. Prior research focused mostly on examining changes to students’ self-efficacy across large time intervals (months or years), and paid less attention to changes at the level of lesson sequences. Knowledge of how self-efficacy changes during a sequence of lessons is important as it can help teachers better support students’ self-efficacy in their everyday work. In this paper, we expanded previous studies by investigating changes in students’ self-efficacy across a sequence of 3–4 lessons when students were learning a new topic in mathematics (nStudents = 170, nTime-points = 596). Nine classes of Norwegian grade 6 (n = 77) and grade 10 students (n = 93) reported their self-efficacy for easy, medium difficulty, and hard tasks. Using multilevel models for change, we found (a) change of students’ self-efficacy across lesson sequences, (b) differences in the starting point and change of students’ self-efficacy according to perceived task difficulty and grade, (c) more individual variation of self-efficacy starting point and change in association with harder tasks, and (d) students in classes who were taught a new topic in geometry had stronger self-efficacy at the beginning of the first lesson as compared to those who were taught a new topic in algebra (grade 10), and students in classes who were taught a new topic in fractions had steeper growth across the lesson sequence as compared to those who were taught a new topic in measurement (grade 6). Implications for both research and practice on how new mathematics topics are introduced to students are discussed.

Intensive longitudinal studies typically examine phenomena that vary across time, individuals, contexts, and other boundary conditions. This poses challenges to the conceptualization and identification of replicability and generalizability, which refer to the invariance of research findings across samples and contexts as crucial criteria for trustworthiness. Some of these challenges are specific to intensive longitudinal studies, others are similarly relevant for the work with other complex datasets that contain multilayered sources of variation (individuals nested in different types of activities or organizations, regions, countries, etc.)This article opens with discussing the reasons why research findings may fail to replicate. We then analyze reasons why research findings may falsely appear to be non-replicable when in fact they were as such replicable, but lacked generalizability due to heterogeneity between samples, subgroups, individuals, time points, and contexts. Following that, we propose conceptual and methodological approaches to better disentangle non-replicability from non-generalizability and to better understand the exact causes of either problem. In particular, we apply Lakatos’s proposition to examine not only whether but under what boundary conditions a theory is a useful description of the world, to the question whether and under which conditions a research finding is replicable and generalizable. Not only will that contribute to a more systematic understanding of and research on replicability and generalizability in longitudinal studies and beyond, but it will also be a contribution to what has been called the heterogeneity revolution (Bryan et al., 2021; Moeller, 2021).

We examined whether learning experiences (value of success, mastery experience) and task properties (challenge) are related to early adolescents’ (n = 190, median age = 12) emotional responses and psychophysiological states (autonomic nervous system, ANS) in achievement situations in an ambulatory laboratory. They completed four achievement tasks (two math and two reading) at different challenge levels in randomized order, and reported their learning and task perceptions for each task. The proportion of errors indicated the objective demandingness of each task. As indices of sympathetic nervous system activity, we recorded skin conductance response (SCR) and heart rate (HR), and, as parasympathetic nervous system activity, their heart rate variability (HRV). Following control-value and flow theories, we proposed hypotheses for main and interaction effects and specified multilevel models (tasks nested in persons). Novel findings emerged. Aside from the anticipated main effects, Challenge × Mastery interaction also was related to adolescents’ emotions and SCR at the within-person (task) level. Furthermore, Value × Mastery Experience interaction was related to SCR and HRV at the task level, whereas Value × Errors interaction contributed to experienced anger and anxiety at the between-person (individual) level. The findings provide novel understanding of situational interplay between the value of success, challenge, and mastery experience in adolescents’ experienced emotions and psychophysiological states. peerReviewed

When classroom observations are increasingly used for accountability and evaluation purposes, a deeper understanding of the psychometric properties of such measurement tools is needed. The present study took a unique approach to examine the psychometric properties of a commonly used classroom observation measure by testing the reliability of indicators for higher-order constructs (i.e. dimensions). We investigated the reliability of indicator ratings of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) Pre-K instrument in Finnish kindergarten and first grade classrooms. Twenty-one observer pairs rated 838 segments identified from the 413 lessons of 48 teachers. Variance components models were specified to investigate variance proportions of each indicator and dimension. The results showed that most observer disagreement was found for the instructional support domain. Observers disagreed relatively more depending on the teacher they observed. There is a clear need for additional understanding on how observers process information on the complex elements of classroom interaction in order to improve training programmes and the reliability and accuracy of the assessment procedure. peerReviewed

Objective: Experimental studies show small to moderate effects of both acute and regular physical activity on executive functions, these being strongly associated with academic performance at school. In order to understand the naturally occurring associations between primary school-aged children's working memory, self-reported sustained attention, and physical activity, 35 children (Mage = 9.8 years, range = 7.6–11.4 years old) in Years 3–6 of primary school took part in a two-week long intraindividual study. Methods: Participants wore an accelerometer wristband throughout the study, and carried out a working memory task (digit recall) and completed a sustained attention measure each morning and afternoon, giving 517 time-points nested in 4–10 school-days (Mobs = 15.8 situations, nobs = 4–18). Results: Using multilevel structural equation models (MSEM), we found that working memory was stable across time (within-person b = 0.29) and trait-like (ICCs = 0.58). Across situations, state-working memory was higher later in the calendar week. Acute moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) was not associated with state-working memory, but exertion of a higher level of MVPA than usual the previous day was associated with lower state-working memory the following day. Trait-sustained attention (across the two weeks) predicted higher trait-working memory and older students outperformed younger students. Conclusions: Implications for timing and intensity of students’ physical activity in educational settings is discussed.