Wim Van den Noortgate

KU Leuven & imec · Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences; itec research group

The Kaufman Domains of Creativity Scale (K-DOCS), a self-report measure designed to capture creative behaviors across various domains, has been utilized and validated across different cultural contexts. The present study sought to assess the psychometric properties of an Arabic version of the K-DOCS. Using exploratory graph analysis followed by con...

The use of multilevel models to combine and compare the results of multiple single-case experimental design (SCED) studies has been proposed about two decades ago. Since then, the number of multilevel meta-analyses of SCED studies steadily increased, together with the complexity of multilevel models used. At the same time, many studies were done to...

Prior research suggests that secure base script knowledge is categorically distributed in middle childhood but becomes dimensionally distributed from late adolescence onward, potentially indicating a developmental shift in the nature of secure base script knowledge. Secure base script knowledge may initially be sparse, giving rise to categorical in...

Computational thinking (CT) is a concept of growing importance to pre-university education. Yet, CT is often assessed through results, rather than by looking at the CT process itself. Process-based assessments, or assessments that model how a student completed a task, could instead investigate the process of CT as a formative assessment. In this wo...

Instructional support can be implemented in learning environments to pseudo-modify the difficulty or time intensity of items presented to persons. This support can affect both the response accuracy of persons towards items as well as the time persons require to complete items. This study proposes a framework to model response time in learning envir...

In this chapter, we introduce computerized adaptive practice (CAP) and its implementation in adaptive learning environments for practicing learners’ native language, Dutch and English as a Foreign Language. In CAP, the difficulty of items or exercises is adjusted to the ability of the student. This allows for deliberate practice, and individualized...

The current study explored longitudinally whether oxytocin receptor gene methyla-tion (OXTRm) changes moderated the association between parental sensitivity changes and children's attachment changes over three waves. Six hundred six Flemish children (10-12 years, 42.8%-44.8% boys) completed attachment measures and provided sali-vary OXTRm data on s...

Single‐case experimental designs (SCEDs) may offer a reliable and internally valid way to evaluate technology‐enhanced learning (TEL). A systematic review was conducted to provide an overview of what, why and how SCEDs are used to evaluate TEL. Accordingly, 136 studies from nine databases fulfilling the inclusion criteria were included. The results...

In adaptive digital learning environments, it is essential to track learning trajectories. The Elo rating system, known for its computational simplicity, is frequently employed for this purpose. Current Elo-based systems cannot handle rapid changes in ability or are unable to balance accuracy and speed when updating player and item ratings. Changes...

Meta-analysis is often recognized as the highest level of evidence due to its notable advantages. Therefore, ensuring the precision of its findings is of utmost importance. Insufficient reporting in primary studies poses challenges for meta-analysts, hindering study identification, effect size estimation, and meta-regression analyses. This manuscri...

Despite being widely assumed, the worsening impact of unpredictability on pain perception remains unclear because of conflicting empirical evidence, and a lack of systematic integration of past research findings. To fill this gap, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis focusing on the effect of unpredictability on pain perception. We al...

Due to swift technological changes in society, programming tasks are proliferating in formal and informal education around the globe. However, challenges arise regarding the acquisition of programming skills. Many students are unequipped to develop programming skills due to limited instruction or background and therefore feel insecure when encounte...

Over the last decade, Higher Education has focused more of its attention toward soft skills compared to traditional technical skills. Nevertheless, there are not many studies concerning the relation between the courses followed within an academic program and the development of soft skills. This work presents a practical approach to model the effect...

Background Augmented reality (AR) is receiving increasing interest as a tool to create an interactive and motivating learning environment. Yet, it is unclear how instructional support affects performance in AR. Objectives This study sought to explore how varying the instructional support in AR can affect performance‐related behaviours of students...

Despite being widely assumed, the worsening impact of unpredictability on pain perception remains unclear due to conflicting empirical evidence, and a lack of systematic integration of past research findings. To fill this gap, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis focusing on the effect of unpredictability on pain perception. We also c...

Rural preschool teachers are increasingly experiencing job burnout, which could lead to their intention to leave and negatively impact education quality. This research explored the prevalence of job burnout among preschool teachers in rural China. It further investigated the potential influence of job-related characteristics on their levels of burn...

The aim of the present study was to examine whether loneliness and friendship quality are bidirectionally associated with one another over time. Based on the Evolutionary Theory of Loneliness (Cacioppo & Cacioppo, 2018) and the classical definition of loneliness (Peplau & Perlman, 1982), such a bidirectional association would be expected, but empir...

A broad range of factors have been associated with the development of adolescent loneliness. In the family context, a lack of parental support and high levels of parental psychological control have systematically been linked to loneliness. On the biological level, DNA methylation (which is an epigenetic process that suppresses gene expression) is b...

Reading is a fundamental skill to acquire during children's school career. The present meta‐analysis examined research on the effectiveness of digital technologies to foster early reading skills during Tier‐1 interventions (ie, high‐quality core reading instruction which is intended to promote learning for all children). Unlike previous meta‐analys...

The transition from primary to secondary school is an impactful life event for early adolescents. This life event is hypothesized to be associated with increased feelings of loneliness, as it is often associated with changes in adolescents’ social network. However, this hypothesis has not been empirically tested so far. The present study aimed to f...

The effectiveness of interventions for internalizing disorders in children and adolescents was studied using a review and meta-analysis of published single-case research. Databases and other resources were searched for quantitative single-case studies in youth with anxiety, depressive, and posttraumatic stress disorders. Raw data from individual ca...

The current study examined whether secure base script knowledge can buffer against higher concurrent externalizing problems and against relative increases in externalizing problems associated with cumulative family stress. We conducted a one-year longitudinal study with two waves between 2017 and 2019 in which 272 Dutch-speaking Western European ch...

Background: Daily Hassles (DH) or daily stress - is a mild type of stressor with unique contributions to psychological distress. Yet, most prior studies that investigate the effects of stressful life experiences focus on childhood trauma or on early life stress and little is known about the effects of DH on epigenetic changes in stress system rela...

Recommender systems are increasingly being used in university or online education. However, recommender systems still have not found major usage in K12 education. This may be because of unique challenges that recommender systems face when used by a young and diverse population. Regardless, recommender systems for K12 education could provide many be...

Recent studies demonstrated that the adult-preschooler interaction during shared book reading (SBR) contributes to its effectiveness (Mol et al., 2008). The level of abstraction, or complexity, of the mathematical questions adults formulate during SBR serves as an indicator of the interaction quality. We aimed to investigate the chance of spontaneo...

In cognitive diagnosis assessment (CDA), the impact of misspecified item-attribute relations (or “Q-matrix”) designed by subject-matter experts has been a great challenge to real-world applications. This study examined parameter estimation of the CDA with the expert-designed Q-matrix and two refined Q-matrices for international large-scale data. Sp...

To obtain more accurate and robust feedback information from the students’ assessment outcomes and to communicate it to students and optimize teaching and learning strategies, educational researchers and practitioners must critically refect on whether the existing methods of data analytics are capable of retrieving the information provided in the d...

To obtain more accurate and robust feedback information from the students’ assessment outcomes and to communicate it to students and optimize teaching and learning strategies, educational researchers and practitioners must critically refect on whether the existing methods of data analytics are capable of retrieving the information provided in the d...

Comparative judgments permit the assessment of open-ended student works by constructing a latent quality scale through repeated pairwise comparisons (i.e., which works “win” or “lose”). Adaptive comparative judgments speed up the judgment process by maximizing the Fisher information of the next comparison. However, at the start of a judgment proces...

This study evaluated the effects of a school-based creative expression program on mental health and classroom social relationships in elementary school children with refugee and nonrefugee migration backgrounds. It was hypothesized that children receiving the intervention would report less externalizing and internalizing problem behaviors, less pos...

Given the increasing interest in meta-analyses of Single-Case Experimental Design (SCED) studies mainly in the fields of behavioral, communication disorders, educational, and rehabilitation research, the aim of the present review is to determine the general characteristics of these meta-analyses, namely design characteristics, the kind of data prov...

Network meta-analysis (NMA) allows the combination of evidence on the effectiveness of several interventions. NMA has mainly been applied in the medical science field, whereas in the domain of psychology and educational sciences its use is less frequent. Consequently, systematic reviews that describe the characteristics of published NMAs are limite...

Background European countries face the challenge of promoting refugee and immigrant children’s well-being within their host communities, invoking the necessity of adequate mental health assessment. This study aims to contribute to document the psychosocial well-being of primary school refugee and non-refugee immigrant children in Flanders, Belgium....

The present study offers a meta-analysis of effectiveness studies on dialogue-based CALL, systems affording a learner practice in a foreign language (L2) by interacting with a conversational agent ("bot"). Through a systematic inclusion and exclusion process, we identified 17 relevant meta-analyzable studies. We made use of Morris and DeShon's (200...

Young adolescents are hypothesized to differ in their environmental sensitivity, at both phenotypic (i.e., Sensory Processing Sensitivity [SPS]) and physiological (i.e., biological stress response) level. This is the first study that investigated whether individual differences in environmental sensitivity at physiological level could be predicted b...

This text focuses on the quantitative integration of studies using alternating treatments designs (ATDs) and changing criterion designs (CCDs) with other types of single-case experimental designs (SCEDs), such as multiple-baseline and withdrawal, which have received more attention in terms of statistical developments. First, a review of how publish...

The present study offers a meta-analysis of effectiveness studies on dialogue-based CALL, i.e., systems allowing a learner to practice a second language (L2) by interacting with a conversational agent ("bot"). Through a systematic inclusion and exclusion process, screening 419 publications, we identified 17 relevant meta-analysable studies. We made...

Single-case designs (SCDs) are used to evaluate the effects of interventions on individual participants. By repeatedly measuring participants under different conditions, SCD studies focus on individual effects rather than on group summaries. The main limitation of SCDs remains its generalisability to wider populations, reducing the relevance of the...

Blended learning has risen in primary and secondary schools due the COVID-19 pandemic, and is expected to remain after the pandemic. Despite this, the large majority of research into blended learning has studied university student populations. Thus, this paper seeks to research differences in usage between and in primary and secondary schools. Data...

Multiple baseline (MB) designs are becoming more prevalent in educational and behavioral research, and as they do, there is growing interest in combining effect size estimates across studies. To further refine the meta-analytic methods of estimating the effect, this study developed and compared eight alternative methods of estimating intervention e...

Cognitive load plays an important role during learning and working, as it has been linked to well-functioning cognitive processes, performance, burnout and depression. Nonetheless, attempts to assess cognitive load in real-time by means of physiological data have been proven difficult, and interpreting these data remains challenging. The aim of thi...

Adolescents differ in their degree of Environmental Sensitivity, that is, the ability to perceive and process information about their environment. The present study aimed to investigate the psychometric properties of the Highly Sensitive Child scale (HSC), a self-report measure of Environmental Sensitivity, in two Belgian and UK samples with a tota...

Adaptive E-learning is growing in popularity as it personalizes recommendations in response to learners’ learning needs. An a priori expectation of the learning environment is that the learners’ performance levels may change in real time as they complete a sequence of items and receive feedback. Also, the learners’ learning (performance) trajectori...

This study reports on the effects of a 1-year parental involvement intervention on reading development of primary school children. The intervention included a teacher and parent training, focusing on teacher-parent communication and parental involvement in homework and reading at home. We used a cluster randomized controlled trial design with pre-,...

During the last decade, many governments and ed‐tech companies have demonstrated an increased interest in digital personalised learning, which resulted in a variety of often game‐like adaptive learning environments. However, there has been limited attention for the impact of these personalised learning technologies on children's learning efficiency...

The current study investigated whether variations at the level of the cortisol stress response moderate the association between parental support and attachment development. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a one-year longitudinal study with two waves in which 101 children (56% girls, Mage = 11.15, SDage = 0.70) participated. Attachment anxiety...

The development of divergent thinking (DT) in school-age children and adolescents has received considerable attention in the educational psychology literature since the 1970s. A body of research has outlined the existence of slumps (i.e., temporary declines) in this development with, however, conflicting findings concerning the magnitude and timing...

The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking-Verbal (TTCT-Verbal) is a commonly used measure of creative potential. The present study examined the factor structure, measurement invariance, and latent mean differences across gender, year of study, and academic major for the Arabic version of the TTCT-Verbal. Data were collected among 621 Egyptian undergra...

Theory and research both point at epigenetic processes affecting both parenting behavior and child functioning. However, little is known about the convergence of mother and child’s epigenetic patterns in families. Therefore, the current study investigated epigenetic covariance in mother–child dyads’ methylation levels regarding four stress-regulati...

Computer vision has shown great accomplishments in a wide variety of classification, segmentation and object recognition tasks, but tends to encounter more difficulties when tasks require more contextual assessment. Measuring the engagement of students is an example of such a complex task, as it requires a strong interpretative component. This rese...

A teaching workforce with good quality is a key factor in the process of China’s rapid development. Although 76% of Chinese pupils are studying at schools within county areas, a general portray of the corresponding teaching workforce is still not clear. This study presents data from a nationally representative survey of primary education teachers i...

Children differ in their sensitivity to positive and negative environmental influences, which can be measured with the Highly Sensitive Child (HSC) scale. The present study introduces the HSC-21, an adaptation of the original 12 item scale with new items and factor structure that are meant to be more informative than the original ones. The psychome...

Meta-analytic datasets can be large, especially when in primary studies multiple effect sizes are reported. The visualization of meta-analytic data is therefore useful to summarize data and understand information reported in primary studies. The gold standard figures in meta-analysis are forest and funnel plots. However, none of these plots can yet...

Research on memory reconsolidation has been booming in the last two decades, with numerous high-impact publications reporting promising amnestic interventions in rodents and humans. However, our own recently-published failed replication attempts of reactivation-dependent amnesia for fear memories in rats suggest that such amnestic effects are not a...

This study examined the temporal relationship between attitude toward mathematics and mathematics achievement among first-year secondary (i.e. middle) school students (grade 7, about 14–15 years) with a focus on sex differences in Central Uganda. Random-intercept cross-lagged panel models, based on structural equation modeling, were used to analyze...

Introduction. Empathy consists of a cognitive and an affective component, of which it is thought that there are gender differences. Previous studies also suggest that maternal and paternal support play a more prominent role in the development of an adolescent’s affective and cognitive empathy, respectively. Besides the environmental factor, that is...

To conduct a multilevel meta-analysis of multiple single-case experimental design (SCED) studies, the individual participant data (IPD) can be analyzed in one or two stages. In the one-stage approach, a multilevel model is estimated based on the raw data. In the two-stage approach, an effect size is calculated for each participant and these effect...

In meta-analysis, primary studies often include multiple, dependent effect sizes. Several methods address this dependency, such as the multivariate approach, three-level models, and the robust variance estimation (RVE) method. As for today, most simulation studies that explore the performance of these methods have focused on the estimation of the o...

Previous research has introduced several effect size measures (ESMs) to quantify data aspects of single-case experimental designs (SCEDs): level, trend, variability, overlap, and immediacy. In the current article, we extend the existing literature by introducing two methods for quantifying consistency in single-case A-B-A-B phase designs. The first...

In the light of a meta-analysis on drug-induced reactivation-dependent amnesia for contextual fear memories in rodents, often referred to as reconsolidation blockade, we are looking for unpublished data meeting all of the following criteria: (1) Population: rats or mice of either sex (2) Intervention: contextual fear conditioning (i.e., one or mul...

Background.Social anxiety symptoms are among the most common mental health problems during adolescence and it has been shown that parenting influences the adolescent's level of social anxiety. In addition, it is now widely assumed that most mental health problems, including social anxiety, originate from a complex interplay between genes and enviro...

Thanks to the advances in digital educational technology, online learning (or e-learning) environments such as Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) have been rapidly growing. In the online educational systems, however, there are two inherent challenges in predicting performance of students and providing personalized supports to them: sparse data and c...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) generate learners' performance data that can be used to understand learners' proficiency and to improve their efficiency. However, the approaches currently used, such as assessing the proportion of correct responses in assessments, are oversimplified and may lead to poor conclusions and decisions because they do...

This study aims to compare the effects of oral, paper and augmented reality (AR) instructions during assembly tasks. 44 assembly operators, the majority of which have cognitive or motor disabilities, participate in a within-subjects experiment in which they perform three different assembly tasks. In doing so, the different instructional media are a...

The methodology of single-case experimental designs (SCED) has been expanding its efforts toward rigorous design tactics to address a variety of research questions related to intervention effectiveness. Effect size indicators appropriate to quantify the magnitude and the direction of interventions have been recommended and intensively studied for t...

In meta-analysis, study participants are nested within studies, leading to a multilevel data structure. The traditional random effects model can be considered as a model with a random study effect, but additional random effects can be added in order to account for dependent effects sizes within or across studies. The goal of this systematic review...

The focus of the current study is on handling the dependence among multiple regression coefficients representing the treatment effects when meta-analyzing data from single-case experimental studies. We compare the results when applying three different multilevel meta-analytic models (i.e., a univariate multilevel model avoiding the dependence, a mu...

Formative assessments are an important component of massive open online courses (MOOCs), online courses with open access and unlimited student participation. Accurate conclusions on students’ proficiency via formative, however, face several challenges: (a) students are typically allowed to make several attempts; and (b) student performance might be...