People appear to be unrealistically optimistic about their future prospects, as reflected by theory and research in the fields of psychology, organizational behavior, behavioral economics, and behavioral finance. Many real-world examples (e.g., consumer behavior during economic recessions), however, suggest that people are not always overly…

This article introduces the Special Class for the Gifted Young (SCGY), an early college entrance program in mathematics and science in China, which has been a focus for media coverage and public discussion of accelerated education in China. We first describe the admission policy and academic programming of SCGY and delineate its distinct features.…

Graduates of associate degree (AD) nursing programs form the largest segment of first-time National Council Licensure Examination for Registered Nurses (NCLEX-RN®) test takers, yet also experience the highest rate of NCLEX-RN® failures. NCLEX-RN® failure delays entry into the profession, adding an emotional and financial toll to the unsuccessful…

Despite a literature spanning over 50 years, there has been little test anxiety research conducted on samples of school-aged students drawn from the UK. As a consequence, little in known about the test anxious experience in the UK, and whether this experience is contextualized by features of the UK educational context. For this reason, the…

Continuous professional development is essential for upgrading and updating teachers because the rate of social and educational change makes pre-service training an inadequate basis for long term professional competence. The design of these continuous professional development programmes must be informed by an effective needs analysis that…

Hiding critical information has resulted in disastrous failures of some major software projects. This paper investigates, using a subset of Keil's test, how graduates (70% of them with work experience) from different cultural backgrounds who are enrolled in a postgraduate course on global software development would handle negative information that…

The present work investigates the validation of a newly developed instrument, the attributional bias instrument, based on achievement attribution theories that distinguish between effort and ability explanations of behavior. The instrument further incorporates the distinction between explanations for success versus failure in academic performance.…

Why didn't China celebrate its stunning PISA performance? Why does Singapore blame its education for its inability to cultivate creative and entrepreneurial talents? Why don't the world's top scorers in international tests have the same level of entrepreneurial activities and capabilities? This essay uncovers the inconsistency between academic…

This is a story of a failed study. In 2007, the authors set out to demonstrate that Kurzweil 3000, an adaptive text-to-speech software program, would help any student revise with its read-aloud function and numerous writing tools. During the course of the study, the authors confronted their misconceptions about students' technology use and…

This paper discusses the findings of research concerned with analysing the relationship between student attendance to core first year undergraduate criminology and criminal justice modules and the grades they receive in their first summative assessed coursework task for these modules. The research took place against the background of a concern…

"No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) dictates students in Grades 3, 5, and 8 pass state tests to be promoted. Accordingly, most state education codes require students to pass reading and math exams for promotion. The majority of those who fail, however, appear to be promoted anyway. This article addresses core questions concerning the paradigm…

In higher education, many high-enrollment introductory courses have evolved into "gatekeeper" courses due to their high failure rates. These courses prevent many students from attaining their educational goals and often become graduation roadblocks. At the authors' home institution, general chemistry has become a gatekeeper course in which…

Natural catastrophes and engineering failures provide timely, motivating, and conceptually rich backdrops for learning. Engineering educators have long embraced case studies of engineering failures as a sound pedagogical strategy for meeting several learning standards, such as "design within realistic constraints", and teaching failure…

Lack of adjustment or school failure is of concern to educators, child welfare workers, educational, and school psychologists as well as parents, but there are few studies on this aspect of education, especially among late adolescents. Furthermore, there is a lack of research on teachers as socialization agents as an independent variable in…

Liyerature;Drawing upon intrinsic linguistic and cultural premises, the present study is an attempt to explore semantic and pragmatic failure, evidently and frequently arising while translating literary texts. This researcher has adopted a functional approach that hinges upon basic semantic and pragmatic premises that best fit the framework of an…