Victor Martinelli

University of Malta · Department of Education Studies

Anxiety is one of adolescents' most frequently experienced mental health issues, but this issue often remains undetected or misdiagnosed. One of the reasons for this is the lack of reliable instruments for screening anxiety disorders among adolescents. For this study, the SCARED scale was translated and adapted to a population of 11 to 15-year-old...

School climate is a topic of increasing importance internationally. The current study investigated the established measurement invariance of an eight-factor school climate scale using a multinational sample of secondary students. School climate factor means across 14 international groups were compared and findings on the association between school...

Reading comprehension relies on the integration of phonological, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic language abilities and early reading success is attributed to several interrelated factors. The current study investigated one of these skills, phonological awareness and its relation to six-year-old children’s mastery in reading Maltese and English....

The educational attainment of the Maltese population is lower than in other European countries and the number of post-secondary graduates is lower than in most other European Union countries. The development of human capital represents the key factor of national social and economic development. In such a situation, schoolteachers are crucial in sup...

Reading comprehension relies on the integration of phonological, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic language abilities. The current study investigated phonological awareness in six-year-old children’s mastery of reading in Maltese and English. The researchers recruited eighty-two bilingual participants attending bilingual schools in Malta and admini...

Empirical studies of the relationship between dyslexia and creativity and visuo-spatial skills are inconsistent. While some anecdotal evidence suggests that there is a positive association between dyslexia and creativity, other studies suggest that such an association emerges only in adulthood as a result of adverse life experiences. Others state t...

A deep approach to learning is essential for student academic achievement and several studies demonstrate a significant association between such an approach to learning and student academic performance. However, findings from some empirical studies in this domain are inconsistent and the main objective of this study was to determine the feasibility...

The aim of this study was to explore the issue of adolescent learners with dyslexia and their visuospatial ability. There is a substantial body of findings in educational and psychological literature suggesting that individuals with dyslexia are likely to have high levels of visuospatial ability. A group of 38 thirteen-year-old male and female bili...

A number of studies suggest that dyslexia is associated with enhanced visuospatial ability but the empirical evidence is inconsistent and there are numerous methodological issues. This study examined visuospatial ability among dyslexic and asymptomatic (non-dyslexic) adolescent boys aged 12 years. Thirty-six Maltese participants constituted the res...

Dyslexia in Malta constitutes a significant share of the work load of most educational psychologists. This difficulty is often compounded by the use of English and Maltese that are taught side by side. Against a backdrop of learners battling against their difficulties with variable rates of success, optimistic voices make a case for such learners’...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that dyslexia may be associated with enhanced visual-spatial ability and creativity. This study set out to explore the possibility of superior visual-spatial skills and creativity in matched research and comparison groups of 24 students each at age 12 years 10 months. All 24 participants with formally diagnosed dyslexia...

This paper presents statistical models that analyze cross-sectional data related to student attainment in English and Maltese spelling. For each spelling test a random sample of 2040 students, whose age ranged from 6.5 to 16 years, was selected to examine the progression of spelling skills over time. The sample comprised equal numbers of male and f...