Through a rigorous process of selecting educational psychology's most useful affective constructs, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) constructed the Students' Approaches to Learning (SAL) instrument, which requires only 10 min to measure 14 factors that assess self-regulated learning strategies, self-beliefs,…

The authors explored the relationship between motivation and affect in upper elementary mathematics classes from the perspective of flow theory. They also investigated the relationship between students' motivation and teachers' instructional practices. Students' reported classroom experiences formed 4 factors--Social Affect, Personal Affect,…

Directing a publicly funded project can present a number of challenges to researchers in reconciling their own philosophy with the expectations of their funders. This paper explores those dilemmas in the context of a four year project funded by the British Government to explore strategies to raise boys' achievement. It reflects on the underlying…

This study addresses the longitudinal associations between youths' out-of-school activities, expectancies-values, and high school course enrollment in the domains of math and science. Data were collected on 227 youth who reported on their activity participation in 5th grade, expectancies-values in 6th and 10th grade, and courses taken throughout…

This study examines two interventions for altering achievement goals in an effort to enhance academic success in struggling Introductory Psychology students. The procedures involved an in-class lecture and an interactive computerized tutorial. Both procedures were successful in altering motivation. This led to changes in study activities and…

This article examines the interplay between school factors and teacher job satisfaction that influences educational outcomes by comparing two Non-governmental Organisation (NGO) schools in Cambodia. This small-scale qualitative case study was conducted over a period of eight weeks in 2005 in two NGO schools in a suburb of Phnom Penh. The findings…

The contributions of this research center on two major areas: delineation of a new model of distance education in which the authors identify three generations of eLearning; and examination of how eLearning and games-based eLearning technologies can be used to enrich the Information Systems (IS) learning experiences of students with different…

Loveland (Colorado) High School is a comprehensive high school of approximately 1,500 students located 50 miles north of Denver. Two years ago, Loveland was not making annual yearly progress (AYP) in any subpopulation as required by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The scores of the general population were not much to brag about either.…

Early childhood educators are justifiably concerned that demands for academic standards in preschool will result in developmentally inappropriate instruction that focuses on a narrow set of isolated skills. But Ms. Stipek believes that teaching preschoolers basic skills can give them a good foundation for their school careers, and she shows that…

This study examined activities used during elementary school math and reading instruction. Teachers reported their use of cooperative, competitive, and individual activities in math and reading, their subjective evaluations of teaching each subject, and their level of focus on promoting students' interests. Analyses indicated that teachers used…

This article looks closely at a subset of books about literacy in and out of school by analyzing images of children learning and struggling to learn to read in realistic fiction. There are several books in which characters wish to learn to read, worry about being poor readers, and work hard to learn to read. These books raise important questions…

This study examined the perceptions of preservice teachers as they reflected upon teaching the writing process to second grade students over the course of one semester. Implications for teacher educators were identified based on the findings: Preservice teachers benefited from teaching writing on a consistent basis; preservice teachers learned and…

In this study, perceived parenting styles and parental involvement were examined to determine if they predicted student motivation. The two views of motivation examined included achievement goal theory and self-determination theory. Algebra I students (N = 140) in a Southeast Texas public high school completed self-report surveys. Multivariate…

In this article, John Forbes, administrative analyst for the 80,000-student Fresno Unified School District in Fresno, and Terrence Young, chief information officer for the 70,000-student Guilford Country Schools in Greensboro, North Carolina, share their strategies for getting staff on board with Web-based data systems. These are the strategies:…

Euro-American values dominate the field of psychology, and their cultural assumptions are often accepted as universal. However, there are significant differences between Western and non-Western thinking and thus what educators take to be psychological norms are often rejected by many of the students and families they are supposed to serve. Despite…