Competition can either increase motivation by providing an added incentive or decrease motivation by threatening participants' sense of competence. The authors used two rounds of competition to examine whether competitions can be structured in ways that motivate high performance and do not discourage losers. Results indicated that a focus on…

The purpose of this mixed methods study is to ascertain how and why parents select an alternative public educational setting for secondary students in the state of Minnesota a state with school choice options. Three research questions address this purpose, including why parents do not send their children to the local public high school, why…

In the past few decades a growing research interest in internal and external factors that contribute to a student's motivation to learn has yielded numerous models and theories. Despite their similarities, these theories have tended to be developed and tested independently of each other, although some connections have been made between them. The…

Background: Effective classroom management is a critical teaching skill and a key concern of educators. As such it has been the focus of much research and as a result educators know a good deal about what happens in physical education class and the actions teachers take to deal with student behavior. Surprisingly, however, we do not know much at…

This paper investigates the determinants of student attendance of economics classes. Course-specific and individual-specific factors are shown to have significant impacts on class attendance. It was found that female students and overseas students skip classes less often. Surprisingly, students involved in extra-curricular activities attend…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to measure the relative effect of relevant explanatory variable on smoking tendency and smoking intensity. Design/methodology/approach: Using survey data collected by the Israeli Bureau of Statistics in 2003-2004, a probit procedure is estimated for analyzing factors that affect the probability of being a…

Recent research in moral psychology has attempted to characterize patterns of moral judgments of actions in terms of the causal and intentional properties of those actions. The present study directly compares the roles of consequence, causation, belief and desire in determining moral judgments. Judgments of the wrongness or permissibility of…

This article links the structural equation modeling (SEM) approach with the principal stratification (PS) approach, both of which have been widely used to study the role of intermediate posttreatment outcomes in randomized experiments. Despite the potential benefit of such integration, the 2 approaches have been developed in parallel with little…

This paper presents new evidence obtained from an empirical study which used three distinct groups of professionals engaged in the attempt to "brainstorm" reasons for pupils' non-attendance. The evidence suggests that the "causes" of pupils' non-attendance can be sub-divided into three main fields: pupils who dislike coming to…

Theoretical perspectives, supported by empirical evidence, have consistently argued that the judicial treatment of offenders by criminal justice agents is sometimes biased by extralegal factors, such as offenders' sociodemographic characteristics. According to defensive attribution theory, individuals tend to protect themselves against unfortunate…

The main purpose of the study was to investigate how individuals with a stated interest in American history described their interest. Understanding interest and the factors influencing interest development in a particular content is important as personal interest has been described as "having a critical role in the learning and development of…

Clinical decision-making is challenging mainly because of two factors: (1) patient conditions are often complicated with partial and changing information; (2) people have cognitive biases in their decision-making and information-seeking. Consequentially, misdiagnoses and ineffective use of resources may happen. To better support clinical…

In 2 studies, we investigated victim attributions (Study 1) and outcomes (Study 2) for workplace aggression and sexual harassment. Drawing on social categorization theory, we argue that victims of workplace aggression and sexual harassment may make different attributions about their mistreatment. In Study 1, we investigated victim attributions in…

Two studies investigate children's knowledge of internal parts and their endorsement of immanent causes for the behaviors of living and non-living things. Study 1, involving 48 preschoolers, showed that domain-specific knowledge of internal parts develops between ages 3 and 4. Study 2 included 43 4-year-olds, 30 8-year-olds, and 35 adults and…

This study investigates why teachers, identified by their school principal as being leaders or having leadership potential, chose not to become school principals. At a time in which the literature is reporting a shortage of qualified applicants for school administrative positions the identified reasons most cited by teacher leaders include…