Upper-primary Students Research Articles

Identifying Variations in Motor Fitness Components among Upper Primary and Secondary School Male Students

Background. Motor fitness helps students develop academically and socially. The students are more engaged in fitness activities with classmates of similar skills. Therefore, motor fitness programs should address kids’ capacity to increase physical activity. Objectives. The study aimed to ascertain variations in upper primary and secondary school male students with respect to selected motor fitness components, i.e. strength (standing broad jump), speed (50-meter sprint) and endurance (800-meter run). Materials and methods. A total of 150 male students, aged 12 to 16, from five schools in Delhi, India, participated in this study. The students were divided into five groups, each consisting of 30 students from both private and government schools. The study assessed three motor fitness components: strength (measured by the standing broad jump), speed (measured by a 50-meter sprint), and cardiovascular endurance (measured by an 800-meter run). The one-way ANOVA was used to identify significant differences among the groups, with post hoc LSD tests performed for pairwise comparisons. A significance level of p < 0.05 was applied to all analyses. Results. The analysis revealed statistically significant differences among the groups in all three motor fitness components: speed (F(4,145) = 27.07, p < 0.05), strength (F(4,145) = 16.93, p < 0.05), and cardiovascular endurance (F(4,145) = 75.46, p < 0.05). Post hoc analysis using the LSD test further indicated that students in each group differed significantly in strength, speed, and cardiovascular endurance when compared to one another. Conclusions. The study concludes that male students in grades nine and ten demonstrate significantly higher levels of strength, speed, and cardiovascular endurance compared to students in grades six, seven, and eight. Therefore, motor fitness programs targeting these components should be tailored differently for upper primary and secondary school students to address their distinct developmental needs.

Unlocking Insights: Harnessing Primary School Children's Experiences and Reflections on Emergency Remote Learning to Shape K-12 e-Learning in the Post-Pandemic Era

The study aimed to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on primary education in Cyprus and to discern the implications for the post-pandemic era, specifically focusing on the Emergency Remote Learning (ERL) experiences and reflections of upper primary students (ages 9-12). Grounded in socio-constructivist learning theory, which emphasizes the importance of active student engagement and social interaction in the learning process, the research explored the challenges students faced during the rapid shift to remote education. A mixed-methods design was employed, using an in-depth online survey that incorporated both quantitative and qualitative questions. Data were collected from a sample of 204 students selected through non-probability, convenience sampling. The analysis revealed that students experienced several challenges, including technology constraints, lack of interaction, and difficulty maintaining concentration, which are consistent with global findings on K-12 ERL. Among demographic factors, the type of school attended (public vs. private) had a significant influence on most aspects of students' ERL experience. Private school students reported more favourable conditions than their public school counterparts, which facilitated a smoother shift to both asynchronous and synchronous ERL, resulting in a more positive overall ERL experience. Regardless of the type of school attended, students overwhelmingly expressed a strong preference for face-to-face learning. Comparisons with other studies conducted in Cyprus during the same period involving older student age cohorts suggest significant age-related differences. The young students in our study encountered greater challenges during the transition to ERL, which can be attributed to their heightened need for scaffolding and external regulation to learn in the virtual space, as well as the higher importance they attached to the social aspects of school life taken away by ERL. Despite their largely negative experiences with ERL, a high proportion of the children advocated integrating the e-learning tools and technologies they got acquainted with during ERL into the normal context of schooling. These findings underscore the importance of further research into effective instructional strategies tailored to young learners in both online and blended learning settings. They also highlight the potential benefits of incorporating e-learning tools into conventional classrooms to enhance the teaching and learning process.

A systematic review and meta‐analysis of AI‐enabled assessment in language learning: Design, implementation, and effectiveness

AbstractBackgroundLanguage assessment plays a pivotal role in language education, serving as a bridge between students' understanding and educators' instructional approaches. Recently, advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have introduced transformative possibilities for automating and personalising language assessments.ObjectivesThis article aims to explore the design and implementation of AI‐enabled assessment tools in language education, filling the research gaps regarding the impact of assessment type, intervention duration, education level, and first language learner/second language learner (L1/L2) on the effectiveness of AI‐enabled assessment tools in enhancing students' language learning outcome.MethodsThis study conducted a systematic review and meta‐analysis to examine 25 empirical studies from January 2012 to March 2024 from six databases (including EBSCO, ProQuest, Scopus, Web of Science, ACM Digital Library and CNKI).ResultsThe predominant design in AI‐driven assessment tools is the structural AI architecture. These tools are most frequently deployed in classroom settings for upper primary students within a short duration. A subsequent meta‐analysis showed a medium overall effect size (Hedges's g = 0.390, p < 0.001) for the application of AI‐enabled assessment tools in enhancing students' language learning, underscoring their significant impact on language learning outcomes. This evidence robustly supports the practical utility of these tools in educational contexts.ConclusionsThe analysis of several moderator variables (i.e., assessment type, intervention duration, educational level and L1/L2 learners) and potential impacts on language learning performance indicates that AI‐enabled assessment could be more useful in language education with a proper implementation design. Future research could investigate diverse instructional designs for integrating AI‐based assessment tools in language education.

Transforming stereotypes: how meeting male and female professors changes children's gender bias and ‘mad professor’ perceptions

ABSTRACT The persistent ‘mad professor’ stereotype – the perception of professors as typically old, dishevelled men with grey hair – contributes to the lack of diversity in the academic workforce, with important implications for social justice and the advancement of science. This study examined the research question of how an informal classroom visit by a male versus a female professor influences gender bias and mad professor stereotyping among upper primary school students. To investigate this question, a survey was conducted with 171 upper elementary school children, examining their gender bias and mad professor stereotyping both before and after a classroom visit from either a male or female professor. The results revealed that visits by female professors significantly reduced gender bias, while visits from male professors, conversely, heightened it. However, this bias-reinforcing effect of male visits was mitigated through supplementary activities that introduced the children to professors from diverse genders and backgrounds. Importantly, visits from both male and female professors were effective in diminishing mad professor stereotyping. This study not only highlights the critical role of a professor’s gender in shaping children’s perceptions but also introduces a novel pictorial choice task for measuring bias, offering an objective alternative to the traditional Draw-a-Scientist test.

Benefits and Challenges of Online Teaching and Learning among Upper Primary ESL Students: The Teachers’ Perspectives

Benefits and Challenges of Online Teaching and Learning among Upper Primary ESL Students: The Teachers’ Perspectives

Integrating unplugged and plugged activities for holistic AI education: An embodied constructionist pedagogical approach

AbstractThere is a growing consensus that AI literacy requires a holistic lens, including not only technical knowledge and skills but also social and ethical considerations. Yet, providing holistic AI education for upper-primary students remains challenging due to the abstract and complex nature of AI and a lack of pedagogical experiences in schools. Against this backdrop, this study employs a design-based research (DBR) methodology to develop pedagogical solutions and theoretical knowledge. Drawing upon theories about AI literacy and learning sciences, this study proposes a novel pedagogical approach, namely, the embodied constructionist approach. This approach, by integrating embodied analogies and constructionist making, forges a cyclical understand–make–reflect process. Through this process, students gradually comprehend the conceptual, technical, and ethical dimensions of AI, towards holistic development in AI literacy. This approach was implemented and fine-tuned in authentic classrooms with 107 sixth graders over two years. During the implementation, a variety of qualitative data were collected from classroom observation, video-recording, student interviews and artifacts, and debriefings with the teacher. Using a case studies method, this study uncovered the overall learning progress demonstrated by the class in AI knowledge, skills, and ethical and critical reflections, as well as the reflections and struggles experienced by individual students. This study offers an age-appropriate pedagogy to promote inclusive, holistic AI education in the crucial, yet under-examined upper primary context. It highlights the potential of integrating AI literacy and computational thinking (CT) in K-12 education, while contributing to theoretical knowledge about embodied cognition and constructionism in the context of AI education.

Scientific Validation of Student Competency Scale (SCS) Questionnaire for Assessing the Impact of Happiness Curriculum in Indian Government Schools

The education systems are experiencing a crisis globally as it is no longer enough for students to develop reading and numeracy skills alone. On the other end, the Happiness Index of India, 2024, showcases a poor stand universally, which has been proven to have a detrimental effect on academic performance and the holistic development of learners. In this line, the Happiness Curriculum (HC) was launched in Delhi, 2018, a first step in broadening the traditional public education system to embrace attention to the wholesome development of its students. This soon branched into Uttarakhand, a state ranked one among the three unhappiest states in the nation, under the name "Anandam Pathyacharya". Later, to measure student competencies developed through HC implementation, Brookings, 2020, developed and validated Student Competency Scale (SCS), a tool with 14 items across four subscales, namely Decision Making, Focus, Empathy and Relationships. Here, the scale was adopted and validated among 140 upper primary students in Uttarakhand, India, by incorporating standardised validation procedures such as Bartletts Test of Sphericity, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin, Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Cronbach’s Alpha calculation using SPSS AMOS v26. Sample adequacy was confirmed (0.921). CFA confirmed the scales’ four-dimensional structure with strong factor loadings and model fit indices, while the internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) was high (0.927). Thus, this validation endeavour establishes the scale as a reliable tool to gauge student competencies in the context of the HC. By highlighting the SCS's scientific foundations and how it might be applied to India's educational system, the study offers a scope to measure HC's impact on learners' development.

The shaping of an idea as temporal, multimodal, and collaborative activity: exploring how students develop a board game in L1

Brainstorming activities are quite common in L1 education. However, limited attention has been paid to the concrete unfolding of students’ idea development as a temporal, multimodal, and collaborative process. In this article, we explore how a group of four upper primary students in Year 5 (age 11–12) design a board game in a teaching unit on young people’s communication and toxic language use on social media. The unit was part of an intervention carried out in a study on game-based learning in the school subject Danish L1. Our detailed analysis shows how the students’ development process involved an interplay of different timescales at the micro, meso, and macro level, and a use of different semiotic resources such as spoken and written language as well as drawn sketches for a game board. The layers of meaning expressed through the students’ dialogic talk resulted in a metaphorical chain of reasoning, where the students’ initial loose idea was gradually transformed into a final game concept. This reasoning across modalities was enforced through the choice of bringing in paper and pen for drawing. The study concludes by discussing how we can understand idea generation as a non-linear multimodal process in the L1 classroom, which may have implications for other productive tasks.

Musical creativity in music lessons in Croatia

ABSTRACT Music lessons in Croatia are characterised by the existence of three areas that intertwine and complement each other. Thus, in music lessons, students will listen to music, participate in various activities regarding their musical expression, and learn about music. A music teacher can choose which activities of musical expression he will carry out in his own educational process, and he chooses them according to his own interests as well as the abilities of the students. This paper aims to determine the perception of upper primary school students regarding the musical creativity activities in music lessons. Students (N = 128) from two schools in the Vukovar-Srijem county participated in the survey, and one group of those students actively participated in musical creativity activities. The research results show that students generally have a positive opinion about musical creativity activities. The students who have participated in the musical creativity activities highly rate their competencies for participating in various creative activities.

School climate: Using a person–environment fit perspective to inform school improvement

Strong and consistent findings suggest that a positive school climate is related to improved student outcomes. However, assessment of the school climate rarely considers the environmental fit (or misfit) between individuals' actual or lived experiences and their preferred environment. This study drew on a person-environment fit perspective to examine whether: students’ experiences of the school climate (actual environment) differed from their views of their ideal school climate (preferred environment); the views of the actual and preferred environment differed between schools; and the actual–preferred discrepancy (as a measure of the environmental fit) was related to student wellbeing, resilience and reports of bullying. The results from the analysis of data collected from 993 upper primary school students suggest that outcomes were enhanced when the perceived environment more closely matched the preferred environment. Our study’s findings support using a person-environment fit perspective alongside a socio-ecological approach to inform strategic decisions for school improvement efforts.

The effects of multitasking on metacognitive monitoring in primary and secondary school students

Influenced by the epidemic and the rapid popularization of smart devices, media multitasking has become increasingly common in people’s lives and has attracted the attention of researchers, particularly among adolescents who are native to the digital era. However, previous studies have focused primarily on the relationship between multitasking and general cognitive functions, paying less attention to the connection between multitasking and metacognition, and there is a lack of research specifically addressing adolescents in this context. To address this gap, the current study conducted two experiments with upper primary and secondary school students to explore the relationship between multitasking and adolescents’ metacognition under intrinsic and extrinsic cue conditions using metacognitive monitoring as an indicator. The results revealed that multitasking significantly reduced adolescents’ metacognitive monitoring accuracy. However, the scores on the media multitasking questionnaire did not significantly correlate with metacognitive monitoring accuracy in the laboratory task. This finding suggested that multitasking, under both intrinsic and extrinsic cue conditions, impairs the accuracy of metacognitive monitoring for primary and secondary school students. However, daily media multitasking activities among these students were not significantly correlated with metacognitive monitoring accuracy.

Virtual reality games for 3D multimodal designing and knowledge across the curriculum

Immersive virtual reality (VR) is anticipated to peak in development this decade bringing new opportunities for 3D multimodal designing across all levels of education. The need for students to gain capabilities with multimodal texts—texts that combine two or more modes, such as spoken, written, and visual—is emphasised at all levels of education from P-12 in the Australian Curriculum. Likewise, the use of technology-supported pedagogies is increasing worldwide, rendering multimodal texts ubiquitous across all knowledge domains. This original, qualitative classroom research investigated students’ 3D designing of multimodal texts using an immersive VR head-mounted display. Upper primary students (ages 10–12 years, n = 48) transferred their knowledge of ancient Rome through 2D drawing, writing, speaking, and 3D multimodal designing with VR. The application of multimodal analysis to video data, screen recordings, and think-aloud protocols, and the thematic coding of student and teacher interviews yielded four key findings: (i) VR gaming supported 3D multimodal designing through haptic and embodied experience, (ii) VR improved performance through creative redesigning, (iii) VR-supported knowledge application, consolidation, and transfer, and (iv) pedagogical strengths of VR were situated and transformed practice. This research is timely and significant given the increasing accessibility and affordability of VR and the need to connect research and pedagogical practice to support students’ advanced knowledge and capabilities with multimodal learning across the curriculum.

Peer education program to improve fluid consumption in primary schools—lessons learned from an innovative pilot study

BackgroundAlthough it is widely recognized that more attention needs to be paid to children's fluid intake, there is little information on how to improve it. Peer education has been suggested as an effective approach to changing health behaviors among school children. As a new approach, our study piloted a peer education program to improve children's fluid intake in primary schools. MethodsUniversity students were prepared for their role as peer educators in an elective university course, including the concept of peer education and different pedagogical methods. The peer educators evaluated the training process by completing a questionnaire. The intervention took place during a School Health Day led by the peer educators. An anonymous survey with a questionnaire on knowledge of fluid intake was administered two weeks before, at the end of, and 15 weeks after the intervention. Changes in hydration knowledge were tested using repeated measures ANOVA. ResultsThe pilot program showed increased knowledge about fluid consumption (p < 0.001) in lower and upper primary school children (N = 326) at the end of the School Health Day compared to pre-intervention measures. A positive change was observed after 15 weeks only in upper primary students. Feedback from peer educators was useful for fine-tuning the program. ConclusionsThis innovative program induced positive changes in knowledge about fluid intake in primary school children. The persistence of the changes differed between lower and upper primary school children. Based on the results, the intervention should be replicated to adapt the program to the needs of lower primary school children. Because the training of peer educators and the peer education program appeared to be successful, this program is worthy of international replication. This approach may also be suggested for other behavior change issues.

Playing away stress and anxiety: Exploring nondigital game-based vocabulary learning

Anxiety and stress are the chief factors that handicap tribal learners’ cognition when learning the English language. Learners of English as a second language experience anxiety and stress for several reasons. The study showed that the greater the stress and anxiety were, the less motivation the students had toward learning the English language. The present study intends to mitigate the anxiety and stress of upper primary tribal students through nondigital game-based language learning in the classroom. The sampling method employed in this research was convenient. A questionnaire, pretest, intervention (nondisciplinary game-based language learning), posttest and feedback were used to collect the data. The data were collected from middle school tribal students (n = 100). The collected data were analysed through paired t tests in SPSS, and the results revealed that tribal learners’ performance improved after the intervention. The results highlighted the vocabulary progress achieved by the experimental group through game-based learning. The study concludes with limitations and implications for future research.

Development and validation of Emotional Competence Scale (ECS) for upper primary school students

This paper is an attempt to develop and validate the Emotional Competence Scale (ECS) in order to assess the emotional competence of upper primary school students. This review was done to find the dimensions that measure emotional competence. The dimensions are classified into two broad categories, such as personal competence and social competence. Personal competence includes self-awareness, emotional awareness, emotional regulation, responsible decision-making, and trust in expressivity. Social competence includes social awareness, social skills, and relationship management. The ECS was constructed to measure emotional competence across personal and social dimensions. The scale underwent rigorous development stages, including item collection, expert validation, piloting, item analysis, and refinement. The final ECS comprised 14 items with a five-point Likert scale for responses. Reliability analysis using Cronbach's alpha and split-half reliability demonstrated high internal consistency (α = 0.70, split-half reliability = 0.77). Face and content validity were established through expert evaluations, confirming the scale's appropriateness for measuring emotional competence in upper primary school students.

Giochi di Fibonacci Year II: Competitive Blocks Programming for Young Students

We organized the second edition of Giochi di Fibonacci (Fibonacci’s games), a programming contest for upper primary and lower secondary schools students; contestants compete in their own age division. The contest is organized in three phases, where the first one is based only on logical and algorithmical quizzes, whilst the other two deal with coding using a Blockly environment integrated in our contest’s platform. In this paper we report our experience and analyze the feedback collected from both students and teachers.

Examining pedagogical approaches and learning challenges in social studies education for upper primary students in urban slum areas of Odisha

Examining pedagogical approaches and learning challenges in social studies education for upper primary students in urban slum areas of Odisha

Effectiveness of Structured Teaching Programme on Knowledge regarding Health Hazards of Mobile Phone usage among Upper Primary Students in a Selected School at Bangalore

Effectiveness of Structured Teaching Programme on Knowledge regarding Health Hazards of Mobile Phone usage among Upper Primary Students in a Selected School at Bangalore

Quantitative evaluation of The Imagineerium education project by students: Introducing the trowsdale index of confidence in experiential learning

The Imagineerium is an arts and engineering based curriculum project designed to enhance student confidence in learning. This study reports on the development of the Trowsdale Index of Confidence in Experiential Learning, an instrument designed to conceptualise and operationalise a four-component model of confidence in experiential learning appropriate for upper primary school students, embracing confidence in creativity, confidence in competence, confidence in collaboration, and confidence in learning. Data provided by 140 9- to 10-year-old students both before and after participating in the 10-week programme, demonstrated a significant increase in scores on this measure at time two, although there was no increase in scores on a control variable hypothesised not to be influenced by the intervention.

Efficacy Of Computer-Assisted Instruction (CAI) In Teaching Social Science To Upper Primary Students

Efficacy Of Computer-Assisted Instruction (CAI) In Teaching Social Science To Upper Primary Students