Evaluating the long-term effects of income assistance for material hardship among families with children.

Background: As a key aspect of poverty, material hardship describes day-to-day struggles in affording necessities. In explorations of policy initiatives that mitigate material hardship, evidence suggests direct income support can be effective in alleviating hardship. However, research investigating the long-term effects of income supports is limited, and it remains uncertain as to how benefit receipt may mitigate material hardship for families with children across time.

The effects of live parental infant-directed singing on infants, parents, and the parent-infant dyad: A systematic review of the literature.

Singing to infants is widely accepted as an enjoyable, positive, and beneficial interaction between the parent and infant across cultures. Whilst the literature suggests that live infant-directed singing impacts the infant, the parent doing the singing and the dyad in powerful ways, no systematic review of the evidence has yet been conducted. To this end, this systematic review identified 21 studies that investigated the effect of live parental infant-directed singing.

Investigating the measurement of academic resilience in Aotearoa New Zealand using international large-scale assessment data.

Unlabelled: Academic resilience captures academic success despite adversity and thus is an important concept for promoting equity within education. However, our understanding of how and why rates of academic resilience differ between contexts is currently limited by variation in the ways that the construct has been operationalised in quantitative research. Similarly, comparing the strength of protective factors that promote academic resilience is hindered by differing approaches to the measurement of academic resilience.

Mind the gap - unequal from the start: evidence from the early years of the longitudinal study.

is this country's largest contemporary longitudinal study of child development. The study has been designed to provide insight into the lives of children and young people growing up in the context of twenty-first century New Zealand. The cohort recruited 6853 children representative of the current ethnic and socioeconomic diversity of births in Aotearoa, New Zealand in 2009 and 2010.

Demographic discrepancies between administrative-prioritisation and self-prioritisation of multiple ethnic identifications.

Ethnic classification is an inherently subjective process, especially when multiple ethnic identifications are involved. There are two methods commonly used to classify multiple ethnicities into single categories: administrative-prioritisation (assignment via a predetermined hierarchy) and self-prioritisation (where individuals select their "main" ethnicity). Currently, little is known about whether the demographic composition of outputted ethnic groups differs by prioritisation method.

autopsych: An R Shiny tool for the reproducible Rasch analysis, differential item functioning, equating, and examination of group effects.

In this paper, we present autopsych, a novel online tool that allows school assessment experts, test developers, and researchers to perform routine psychometric analyses and equating of student test data and to examine the effect of student demographic and group conditions on student test performance. The app extends current open-source software by providing (1) extensive embedded result narration and summaries for written reports, (2) improved handling of partial credit data via customizable item-person Wright maps, (3) customizable item- and person-flagging systems, (4) item-response theory model constraints and controls, (5) many-facets Rasch analysis to examine item bias, (6) Rasch fixed item equating for mapping student ability across test forms, (7) tabbed spreadsheet outputs and immediate options for secondary data analysis, (8) customizable graphical color schemes, (9) extended ANOVA analysis for examining group differences, and (10) inter-rater reliability analyses for the verifying the consistency of rater scoring systems. We present the app's architecture and functionalities and test its performance with simulated and real-world small-, medium-, and large-scale assessment data.

Mathematics Self-Concept in New Zealand Elementary School Students: Evaluating Age-Related Decline.

The underrepresentation of females in mathematics-related fields may be explained by gender differences in mathematics self-concept (rather than ability) favoring males. Mathematics self-concept typically declines with student age, differs with student ethnicity, and is sensitive to teacher influence in early schooling. We investigated whether change in mathematics self-concept occurred within the context of a longitudinal intervention to raise and sustain teacher expectations of student achievement.

What constitutes globalised evidence? Cultural tensions and critical reflections of the evidence-based movement in New Zealand.

The evidence-based movement (EBM) is grounded in a well-intentioned desire to ensure resources are invested in high quality initiatives that generate the intended impact. Nevertheless, recent critiques contest the appropriateness of translating an approach rooted in a medical model to socially complex initiatives. Globalised notions of evidence can also be damaging for programs operating in small, culturally diverse countries with limited resources.

Cultural invariance of goal orientation and self-efficacy in New Zealand: Relations with achievement.

Background: There is substantial evidence indicating that various psychological processes are affected by cultural context, but such research is comparatively nascent within New Zealand. As there are four large cultural groups in New Zealand, representing an intersection of individualist, collectivist, indigenous, colonial, and immigrant cultures, New Zealand is an important context in which to investigate the role of culture in such processes.

Aims: This study investigated goal orientation and self-efficacy beliefs among students of different cultural backgrounds in New Zealand, associations between motivational beliefs and achievement, and whether any relations differed by cultural background.