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The present study took a meta-analytic approach to investigate whether students' engagement acts as a mediator in the association between affective teacher-student relationships and students' achievement. Furthermore, we examined whether results differed for primary and secondary school and whether similar results were found in a longitudinal subsample. Our sample consisted of 189 studies (249,198 students in total) that included students from preschool to high school. A distinction was made between positive relationship aspects (e.g., closeness) and negative relationship aspects (e.g., conflict). Meta-analytic structural equation modeling showed that, overall, the associations between both positive relationships and achievement and negative relationships and achievement were partially mediated by student engagement. Subsequent analyses revealed that mediation is applicable to both primary and secondary school. Only the direct association between positive relationships and engagement was stronger in secondary school than in primary school. Finally, partial mediation was also found in the longitudinal subsample.

To determine whether formative writing assessments that are directly tied to everyday classroom teaching and learning enhance students’ writing performance, we conducted a meta-analysis of true and quasi-experiments conducted with students in grades 1 to 8. We found that feedback to students about writing from adults, peers, self, and computers statistically enhanced writing quality, yielding average weighted effect sizes of 0.87, 0.58, 0.62, and 0.38, respectively. We did not find, however, that teachers’ monitoring of students’ writing progress or implementation of the 6 + 1 Trait Writing model meaningfully enhanced students’ writing. The findings from this meta-analysis provide support for the use of formative writing assessments that provide feedback directly to students as part of everyday teaching and learning. We argue that such assessments should be used more frequently by teachers, and that they should play a stronger role in the Next-Generation Assessment Systems being developed by Smarter Balanced and PARCC.

With a one-stage meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) analysis based on 49,416 individuals from 267 independent samples and 210 studies, the current study systematically investigated models including meta-linguistic skills, decoding, language comprehension, and reading comprehension for Chinese population. Findings showed that (1) decoding and language comprehension were moderately related and together explained 52.7% variance of reading comprehension; (2) meta-linguistic skills made significant direct and unique contributions to decoding and showed a strong relation with language comprehension; however, meta-linguistic skills did not make direct contributions to reading comprehension beyond decoding and language comprehension; (3) location (Mainland vs. Hong Kong) did not emerge as a significant moderator in the model; (4) grade level significantly explained the between-study heterogeneity on the relation between decoding and reading comprehension, such that decoding made more contributions to reading comprehension before Grade 2 than after; and (5) the effects of language comprehension on reading comprehension stayed stable with grade, and so did meta-linguistic skills on decoding. These findings, taken together, suggest that the Simple View of Reading can be applied to reading in nonalphabetic languages such as Chinese. For Chinese reading development, Grade 2 may be the transitional grade where the effects of decoding on reading comprehension started to decrease significantly. The null direct effects of meta-linguistics skills on reading comprehension further support the parsimonious structure of Simple View of Reading (decoding and language comprehension) in explaining reading comprehension in Chinese.