Traditional undergraduate students fall in an age range known as emerging adulthood, a development stage of life characterized by freedom and exploration in pursuit of understanding one's identity. This is an important developmental process because a failure to discern this identity and what one finds meaningful can be associated with numerous…

This article examines the attributions of responsibility for racism in the everyday talk of secondary school students. It draws on focus groups with a cross section of students from different ethnic backgrounds in three, very different, secondary schools. In these focus groups, students deploy six different, sometimes contradictory, racialised…

This paper reports the results of preliminary research into how Portuguese academics and employers perceive the responsibility of different higher education stakeholders-students, teaching staff, higher education institutions, employers, and policy-makers-for developing graduate employability. The study was conducted 8 years after the…

This study reports the development of a new Blame Index to determine attributions of the causes of poverty along a single structural-to-individual dimension. A multisite pre-/post-group design tested the degree of change in social work students' (N = 177) perception of poverty as a result of taking a single BSW social policy course or an MSW…

An extensive theoretical and qualitative literature stresses the promise of instructional practices and content aligned with minority students' experiences. Ethnic studies courses provide an example of such "culturally relevant pedagogy" (CRP). Despite theoretical support, quantitative evidence on the effectiveness of these courses is…

This meta-analysis examined the relationship between psychosocial factors and community college student success. Informed by college persistence models and motivational theory, we statistically integrated past research on five psychosocial categories (motivation, self-perceptions, attributions, self-regulation, and anxiety), examining their…

While motivation is commonly interpreted as an individual student's characteristic, motivational perceptions and beliefs, such as causal attributions of success and failure, are embedded in cultural meanings and contextual practices. The current study aimed to investigate causal attributions among Arab high school students in Israel and to…

An extensive theoretical and qualitative literature stresses the promise of instructional practices and content aligned with minority students' experiences. Ethnic studies courses provide an example of such "culturally relevant pedagogy" (CRP). Despite theoretical support, empirical evidence on the effectiveness of these courses is…

Girls presently outperform boys in overall academic success. Corresponding gender stereotypes portray male students as lazy and troublesome and female students as diligent and compliant. The present study investigated whether these stereotypes impact teachers' perceptions of students and whether students' visible enactment of their gender at…

According to attribution theory, people seek to make sense of their environment through ascribing causality to their behavior and the behavior of others and these attributions impact future behavior (Jones et al., 1972). In essence, people seek to answer and understand why. This fundamental concept associated with attribution theory is important…

Three experiments examined children's and adults' abilities to use statistical and temporal information to distinguish between common cause and causal chain structures. In Experiment 1, participants were provided with conditional probability information and/or temporal information and asked to infer the causal structure of a 3-variable mechanical…

This article reports results from two studies of how people answer counterfactual questions about simple machines. Participants learned about devices that have a specific configuration of components, and they answered questions of the form "If component X had not operated [failed], would component Y have operated?" The data from these…

Questions concerning mediated causal effects are of great interest in psychology, cognitive science, medicine, social science, public health, and many other disciplines. For instance, about 60% of recent papers published in leading journals in social psychology contain at least one mediation test (Rucker, Preacher, Tormala, & Petty, 2011).…

How do people attribute responsibility in situations where the contributions of multiple agents combine to produce a joint outcome? The prevalence of over-determination in such cases makes this a difficult problem for counterfactual theories of causal responsibility. In this article, we explore a general framework for assigning responsibility in…

In self-paced learning, when the regulation of study effort is goal driven (e.g., allocated to different items according to their relative importance), judgments of learning (JOLs) increase with study time. When regulation is data driven (e.g., determined by the ease of committing the item to memory), JOLs decrease with study time (Koriat,…