This study aimed to test a theoretical model of self-efficacy applied to the context of professional choice, verifying the sources of self-efficacy as predictors of self-efficacy beliefs and self-efficacy beliefs as antecedents of vocational exploratory behavior. A total of 388 high school students from public and private schools in the state of…

The process of learning includes not only success in developing knowledge, skills, and abilities but also mistakes and errors that impede such success. In any domain of learning, instructors will have developed a sense of the typical errors learners make; however, there has been no systematic investigation and documentation of predictable…

The objective of this study was to validate a scale for assessment of academic projects. As a complement, we examined its predictive ability by comparing the scores of advised/corrected projects based on the model and the final scores awarded to the work by an examining panel (approximately 10 months after the project design). Results of…

This article proposes a new research approach to teachers' lesson planning. While numerous guidelines have been dominating lesson planning as an object of teacher education, we utilize teacher cognition and expertise research to view lesson planning from a different perspective: We argue that lesson planning typically demands specific cognitive…

Despite the critical role of emotions in multicultural teacher education, no attempt has been made to develop an instrument including affect as a dimension in measuring cultural competence for preservice teachers. To bridge this gap, the present three-study research used three distinct samples of 456 preservice teachers to develop and estimate the…

Augustine and Hemenover (2013) were right to state that meta-analyses should be accurate and generalizable. However, we disagree that our meta-analysis of emotion regulation strategies (Webb, Miles, & Sheeran, 2012) fell short in these respects. Augustine and Hemenover's concerns appear to have accrued from misunderstandings of our inclusion…

This study involves the development and validation of a survey that measures college students' digital readiness for academic engagement in terms of their perceived digital competencies for academic work. Both exploratory and confirmatory analyses were employed to assess the factorial structure of the Digital Readiness for Academic Engagement…

Data mining is known to have a potential for predicting user performance. However, there are few studies that explore its potential for predicting student behavior in a procedural training environment. This paper presents a collective student model, which is built from past student logs. These logs are first grouped into clusters. Then, an…

We study the properties of two specification tests that have been applied to a variety of estimators in the context of value-added measures (VAMs) of teacher and school quality: the Hausman test for choosing between random and fixed effects and a test for feedback (sometimes called a "falsification test"). We discuss theoretical…

Objective: Analysis of the validity and implementation of a child maltreatment actuarial risk assessment model, the California Family Risk Assessment (CFRA). Questions addressed: (1) Is there evidence of the validity of the CFRA under field operating conditions? (2) Do actuarial risk assessment results influence child welfare workers' service…

There has been increasing interest in assessing teachers' cross-curricular competencies as a result of reforms in teacher education in Switzerland. At Zurich University of Teacher Education, future students who do not have formal qualifications are required to pass several examinations and a test, which is known as an "assessment…

Recent research attributes the lack of merit pay in teaching to the resistance of teachers. This paper examines whether the structure of merit pay affects the types of teachers who support it. We develop a model of the relative utility teachers receive from merit pay versus the current fixed schedule of raises. We show that if teachers are risk…

This study proposes a new method named the IIS-map-based method for analyzing interactions in face-to-face collaborative learning settings. This analysis method is conducted in three steps: firstly, drawing an initial IIS-map according to collaborative tasks; secondly, coding and segmenting information flows into information items of IIS; thirdly,…

This paper examines the impact of vouchers in general and voucher design in particular on public school performance. It argues that all voucher programs are not created equal. There are often fundamental differences in voucher designs that affect public school incentives differently and induce different responses from them. It analyzes two voucher…

The Texas Projection Measure (TPM) has grown out of the state's need to meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). An examination of the state's method of predicting 8th grade mathematics scores reveals that several factors have been ignored in the process of developing the model, including assumptions in its underlying statistical…