The purpose of this study was to identify individual and family risk factors that may explain why some students are at risk for academic failure. Students' self-concept, academic motivation, and their parents' involvement in education were reported by both students and teachers. A latent variable path model fit the data well (Comparative Fit Index…

The first decade of the current Labour Government had been characterised by a whole raft of education reforms aimed at driving up standards--a focus on early literacy and numeracy, standards funds to push up exam results, the much greater use of technology to track individual pupils' progress and to ensure a growing number achieved the benchmark…

The latest release of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) provides no evidence for the effectiveness of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. In long-term trends, the achievement gap between white and minority students has hardly budged over the past decade. Congress should get rid of No Child Left Behind…

The phrase "worst since the Great Depression" has seemingly punctuated every economic report. The United States is experiencing the worst housing market, the worst unemployment level, and the worst drop in gross domestic product since the Great Depression. Although the steady drumbeat of bad news may have made everyone nearly numb, one…

This paper explores the role of home-school conflicts in the educational failure of children of Latin American immigrants and examines how these conflicts have been framed and understood in the existing research literature. It argues that structural analyses of barriers to educational attainment alone fail to capture the multiplicity of forces…

The present study concerns redundant data problems, defined as problems in which irrelevant data is provided. This type of problem provides a misleading context [Pascual-Leone, J. (1987). Organismic process for neo-Piagetian theories: A dialectical causal account of cognitive development. "International Journal of Psychology," 22, 531-570] similar…

Having implemented and evaluated over 35 mlearning projects in a variety of contexts in higher education over the past 6 years the researcher is ready to share the untold secret: not all mlearning projects succeed! This article critiques three of the researcher's mlearning projects that can be classed as "failures" and compares them to successful…

In 2009, the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) Committee to Improve High School Graduation Rates and Achievement, led by then-Governor Sonny Perdue of Georgia, released a report of 10 key recommendations for ensuring more students graduate from high school, and they graduate ready for college and careers. Among these 10 recommendations was…

Traditional teaching styles practiced at universities do not generally suit all students' learning styles. For a variety of reasons, students do not always engage in learning in the courses in which they are enrolled. New methods to create and deliver educational material are available, but these do not always improve learning outcomes.…

In this study, the psychometric properties of the scenario-based Achievement Guilt and Shame Scale (AGSS) were established. The AGSS and scales assessing interpersonal guilt and shame, high standards, overgeneralization, self-criticism, self-esteem, academic self-concept, fear of failure, and tendency to respond in a socially desirable manner were…

In this article, the author describes his and a colleague's experience of selecting and interviewing candidates for a tenure-track faculty position. He relates how they thought that they had selected 18 excellent candidates until they met them for interview. The author found that the majority of those they interviewed knew nothing about the…

Recent efforts to deal with college affordability, including measures now before Congress, raise many questions: Why does college cost so much? How can students ever be expected to pay back their loan debt? Why does the middle class always get squeezed? America's historical commitment to the education of its citizens is perhaps the most important…

Despite decades of reform and school improvement initiatives, large numbers of students are still underachieving, failing, or being pushed out of school. Clearly, a distinctly new approach is needed--one that takes into account the global diaspora and increasing school demographic diversity. Unless educators begin to take account of differences in…

The purpose of this study is to determine the effects of an academic support program on students who had been terminated from Eastern Kentucky University because of academic failure. Specifically it: (1) investigates the effect of improvement in reading comprehension, vocabulary and rate on grade point achievement after students participated in a…

Two measures of outerdirectedness were used with 30 educationally handicapped and 30 normal males in the second, fourth, and sixth grades. (CL)