Two major topic areas related to the affective half of prescriptions in mathematics are explored. The first area focuses on stationary or general information about motivation which provides an important backdrop as a prelude to formulating useful individual affective prescriptions. Several observations about stationary motivational variables…

This experiment tested the hypothesis that the sequence of ability and effort attributional feedback influences children's attributions, self-efficacy, and skillful performance. Children deficient in subtraction skills received training on subtraction operations and solved problems over four sessions. During the problem solving, some children…

In self-adapted testing, examinees are allowed to choose the difficulty of each item to be presented immediately before attempting it. Previous research has demonstrated that self-adapted testing leads to better performance than do fixed-order tests and is preferred by examinees. The present study examined the strategies that 29 college students…

This literature review focuses on the problem of lack of student motivation to learn. The purposes of this review are described as an exploration of factors that influence classroom motivation and suggestions of strategies for promoting students' desire to learn. Annotations are provided in these areas: student/teacher interaction and classroom…

This paper lends support to Richard E. Clark's position that media make no difference in student achievement, but also argues that alternative ways of thinking about media--i.e., about the differences media do make along with the differences they can make--are necessary and important. Two major areas of study are examined. In discussing the first…

This study examined whether pupils' causal attribution tendencies could be influenced by teachers' attributions of their performance. In addition, the relationship between pupils' causal attributions and their school anxiety was studied. Based on Weiner's (1979) taxonomy of attributions that distinguishes between external versus internal and…

The decade of the 1970's saw an alarming decline in the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores of entering college freshmen, and it was theorized that this might be attributed to a corresponding decline in study attitudes. To test this hypothesis, math and verbal SAT scores, study habits, and attitudes of college freshmen in the classes of 1973 and…

Social science perspectives on black maternal childrearing practices have traditionally ignored the cultural-historical, socio-political, and economic realities. Interviews were conducted with 62 black mothers to study their perceptions of racism and its effects on their childrearing practices. Results indicated that educational status alone did…

Sex differences in attributions for success and failure in algebra of Samoan community college students were examined and compared with attributions of a large group of mainland U.S. students. study included the Mathematics Attribution Scale: Algebra Version (MAS), which assessed students' attributions of achievement in algebra to their effort,…

The psychology of emotion has been studied primarily from an intrapsychic perspective. A social psychological perspective of emotion can supplement this intrapsychic approach by examining three areas: (1) controlling the emotions of others; (2) controlling the thoughts of others through emotional expression; and (3) emotional congruence, or the…

A study was conducted (1) to investigate factors that influence an instructor's choice of behavior when confronted with incidents of students' poor communication performance, and (2) to demonstrate how attribution theory can be used as a vehicle for describing and understanding the causes of instructor reactions or behaviors. The study sought to…

The purpose of this study is to determine whether locus of control scores for students in "open" programs changed significantly over a one-year period and whether there was any change different from change experienced by students in a "traditional" program. The lack of significant group main effects indicated that students in the open programs did…

This record of the Senate Juvenile Justice Subcommittee hearing concerns the problem of violent juvenile crime. Opening statements by subcommittee members are followed by testimonies from three panels of witnesses. The first panel presents statements by the founder of the Guardian Angels, the director of the House of Umoga, a home for juvenile…

Conceptual level is a personal characteristic that describes persons on a developmental hierarchy of increasing conceptual complexity, self-responsibility, and independence. The relationship between gender and conceptual level was explored in a group of 70 male and 63 female college students. The This I Believe Test (TIB) was administered to…

A cognitive/behavioral model of depression emphasizing the self-control processes of self-monitoring, self-evaluation, and self-reinforcement views self-control as a set of processes by which an individual maintains responses in the relative absence of immediate external reinforcement. The relationship between self-evaluation, attributional style,…