A healthy breakfast each and every day is important for students' motivation and achievement.

Breakfast is often cited as the most important meal of the day and vital for students' academic functioning at school. Although much research has linked students' breakfast consumption to better achievement, there has been debate about why and how breakfast has academic benefits. The present study of 648 Australian high school students investigated (a) the role of breakfast consumption and breakfast quality in students' self-reported motivation and their achievement in a science test, (b) the role of motivation in mediating the link between breakfast consumption and quality and students' achievement, and (c) the extent to which breakfast consumption effects are moderated by the quality of breakfast (e.g., more vegetables, fruit, dairy/protein, wholegrains, cereals, water; less sugary drinks, processed meat, fast take-away, unhealthy snack foods). Findings indicated that beyond the effects of personal, home, and classroom factors, breakfast consumption predicted higher adaptive motivation (p < .05), breakfast quality predicted lower maladaptive motivation (p < .05), and in turn, students' adaptive (positively, p < .01) and maladaptive (negatively, p < .01) motivation predicted their achievement. Moreover, adaptive motivation significantly mediated the relationship between breakfast consumption and achievement (p < .05). The effect of breakfast consumption was moderated by the quality of breakfast such that consuming a high-quality breakfast in the morning was associated with the highest levels of adaptive motivation (p < .01) and achievement (p < .05) later in the day. Findings have implications for educational practice and policy seeking to promote a healthy start to the school day to optimize students' motivation and achievement.

Adapting implementation science for higher education research: the systematic study of implementing evidence-based practices in college classrooms.

Finding better ways to implement effective teaching and learning strategies in higher education is urgently needed to help address student outcomes such as retention rates, graduation rates, and learning. Psychologists contribute to the science and art of teaching and learning in higher education under many flags, including cognitive psychology, science of learning, educational psychology, scholarship of teaching and learning in psychology, discipline-based educational research in psychology, design-based implementation research, and learning sciences. Productive, rigorous collaboration among researchers and instructors helps. However, translational research and practice-based research alone have not closed the translation gap between the research laboratory and the college classroom. Fortunately, scientists and university faculty can draw on the insights of decades of research on the analogous science-to-practice gap in medicine and public health. Health researchers now add to their toolbox of translational and practice-based research the systematic study of the process of implementation in real work settings directly. In this article, we define implementation science for cognitive psychologists as well as educational psychologists, learning scientists, and others with an interest in use-inspired basic cognitive research, propose a novel model incorporating implementation science for translating cognitive science to classroom practice in higher education, and provide concrete recommendations for how use-inspired basic cognitive science researchers can better understand those factors that affect the uptake of their work with implementation science.

Understanding Girls' Disengagement: Identifying Patterns and the Role of Teacher and Peer Support using Latent Growth Modeling.

Previous work has established a significant increase in disengagement as students progress through secondary school. This work has also established that rates of disengagement appear to be higher among boys, leading to an increased focus on the underlying causes and factors associated with disengagement within this population. However, less is known about the patterns of disengagement exhibited by girls. Given that disengagement is consistently associated with negative personal and academic outcomes, it is important to more closely examine the disengagement trajectories of girls. Moreover, it critical to identify factors that buffer the effects of disengagement that are the most effective for girls. Classroom interpersonal support from teachers and peers have been identified as factors that are likely to mitigate disengagement among girls. The present investigation examined longitudinal data from Australian adolescent girls (N = 302, age range 12-16 years old). Latent growth modeling was used to examine the extent to which disengagement was increasing among secondary school girls in Australia, as well as the effects of teacher and peer social support in slowing this increase. The results showed that disengagement significantly increased across 3 years and that teacher support (but not peer support) was associated with a reduction in girls' upward disengagement trajectories. The results of the current study provide much-needed insight about the developmental trajectories of disengagement among adolescent girls and the role of teachers in buffering these problematic trajectories.