Practical arts is a subject that not only promotes learners' better understanding of work in their daily lives, but also enables them to find ways to solve work-related problems by fostering basic skills and attitudes necessary for performing the work. The teaching of practical arts as a subject should be focused on developing creativity and…

The primary purpose of the study is to assess the degree to which SAT scores, high-school GPA (HSGPA) and class rank predict success in college. Data collected from students enrolled in several sections of Principles of Economics at the University of South Carolina in 2000 and 2001 are used to study the relation between college GPA (the dependent…

The present study focuses on the relationship between teacher empowerment and teachers' organizational commitment, professional commitment (PC) and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). It examines which subscales of teacher empowerment can best predict these outcomes. The data were collected through a questionnaire returned by a sample of…

School effectiveness research has fueled debate on the importance of a press for academic excellence versus communal values. Research on parenting styles offers a theoretical framework that may resolve the debate. We hypothesized that dimensions of parenting styles--demandingness (academic press) and responsiveness (communal values)--predict…

This study investigated the effect of phonological sensitivity of two comparable groups of grades 4 and 5 Chinese children, one a Putonghua-speaking group ("n" = 77) from Beijing and the other a Cantonese-speaking group ("n" = 80) from Hong Kong on English and Chinese pseudoword reading. It was hypothesized that the Beijing…

We have investigated the hypothesis that stress condition will accelerate pubertal maturation in adolescent girls and that faster maturing girls will display more behavioral problems than their on-time or late-maturing peers during pubertal development. Longitudinal data were collected yearly from 1986 to 1997. Parents of 1039 French-speaking…

Although several studies in the affluent world have examined the job satisfaction and dissatisfaction of lecturers in higher education, little is known about academic job satisfaction in the low-resource countries. This study probes those factors contributing to academic satisfaction and dissatisfaction in higher education in the developing world.…

Often quantitative data in the social sciences have only ordinal justification. Problems of interpretation can arise when least squares multiple regression (LSMR) is used with ordinal data. Two ordinal alternatives are discussed, dominance-based ordinal multiple regression (DOMR) and proportional odds multiple regression. The Q[superscript 2]…

The purpose of this study was to investigate factors that contribute to individual differences in the school performance of 2nd-grade children born to adolescent mothers. The sample of this study was 90 low-income adolescent mothers and their children. Data were collected from the adolescent mothers and their first-born children, now in 2nd grade,…

This study proposed that precollege students' standardized mathematics achievement score and the congruence between their occupational interests and engineering tasks would predict their second-year retention in college and the stability of their major. Binary response models were used to predict second-year major status (i.e., continue, transfer…

Background: Despite the widespread use of the term "empowerment" in clinical literature to describe both a desirable process and the outcome of service delivery, the term remains more of a theoretical than practical construct. This study examined the factors that contribute to empowerment in parents of school-aged children with and without…

This article proposes a critical theoretical paradigm for the evaluation of university-community-school partnerships. Although numerous models have been posited for assessing these collaborative endeavors, few of them have granted adequate attention to the voices of community partners, and none have centered on systemic issues of power and…

We analyze survey data from 181 male and 224 female inmates serving brief prison terms for nonviolent offenses to examine offenders' perceptions of the severity of boot camp compared to prison. Building on the limited work in this area, we present reasons those offenders feel are important to both avoid and participate in alternative sanctions.…

While an adolescent sexual offender's response to treatment is thought to be impacted by both static and dynamic factors, there is no objective method of assessing the likelihood of success or failure in treatment. The assessment of amenability to treatment is generally a subjective process completed by clinicians in the field. Using descriptive…

The growth in the international education market within the next two decades will be dominated by Asia, accounting for almost 70% of the global demand for international higher education (Bohm et al., 2002). The market attractiveness with significant pecuniary and non-pecuniary gains from full-fee paying students will result in a more competitive…