How first-language instruction transfers to majority-language skills.

With an increasing number of immigrant children in many countries, questions of how to prepare them for further education become highly salient. Few studies have examined the effect of first-language instruction on children's engagement in school and how that may later transfer into better majority-language outcomes. A randomized controlled trial in Denmark (n = 230) took an asset-based approach to students' cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

Does parental education influence child educational outcomes? A developmental analysis in a full-population sample and adoptee design.

Children's educational outcomes are strongly correlated with their parents' educational attainment. This finding is often attributed to the family environment-assuming, for instance, that parents' behavior and resources affect their children's educational outcomes. However, such inferences of a causal role of the family environment depend on the largely untested assumption that such relationships do not simply reflect genes shared between parent and child.

A stable relationship between personality and academic performance from childhood through adolescence. An original study and replication in hundred-thousand-person samples.

Objective: Many studies have demonstrated that personality traits predict academic performance for students in high school and college. Much less evidence exists on whether the relationship between personality traits and academic performance changes from childhood to adolescence, and existing studies show very mixed findings. This study tests one hypothesis-that the importance of Agreeableness, Emotional Stability, and Conscientiousness for academic performance changes fundamentally during school-against an alternative hypothesis suggesting that the changing relationships found in previous research are largely measurement artifacts.

Influence of motor skills training on children's development evaluated in the Motor skills in PreSchool (MiPS) study-DK: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial, nested in a cohort study.

Background: Good motor skills are considered important for children's physical, social, and psychological development, but the relationship is still poorly understood. Preschool age seems to be decisive for the development of motor skills and probably the most promising time-window in relation to preventive strategies based on improved motor skills. This research program has four overall aims: (1) investigation of the effect of a structured program aimed at improving motor skills in 3-6-year-old children on current and future motor skills, health, cognition, and wellbeing; (2) establish reference data on motor skills in 3-6-year-olds; (3) description of early development of musculoskeletal problems; and (4) establishment of a population-based cohort of 3-6-year-olds.

Reading intervention with a growth mindset approach improves children's skills.

Laboratory experiments have shown that parents who believe their child's abilities are fixed engage with their child in unconstructive, performance-oriented ways. We show that children of parents with such "fixed mindsets" have lower reading skills, even after controlling for the child's previous abilities and the parents' socioeconomic status. In a large-scale randomized field trial (N = 72; N = 1,587) conducted by public authorities, parents receiving a reading intervention were told about the malleability of their child's reading abilities and how to support their child by praising his/her effort rather than his/her performance.

Increasing instruction time in school does increase learning.

Increasing instruction time in school is a central element in the attempts of many governments to improve student learning, but prior research-mainly based on observational data-disputes the effect of this approach and points out the potential negative effects on student behavior. Based on a large-scale, cluster-randomized trial, we find that increasing instruction time increases student learning and that a general increase in instruction time is at least as efficient as an expert-developed, detailed teaching program that increases instruction with the same amount of time. These findings support the value of increased instruction time.