The authors explore the hypothesis that career decision-making self-efficacy could be affected by negative career thoughts, Big Five personality factors, and cultural mistrust in a sample of African American and Caucasian college students. Findings demonstrated that negative career thinking, openness, and conscientiousness explained a significant…

On belief-desire reasoning tasks, children first pass tasks involving true belief before those involving false belief, and tasks involving positive desire before those involving negative desire. The current study examined belief-desire reasoning in participants old enough to pass all such tasks. Eighty-three 6- to 11-year-olds and 20 adult…

Enthusiasm for problem-based learning (PBL) is widespread, yet there exists little rigorous experimental evidence of its effectiveness, especially in K-12 populations. Reported here is a highly controlled experimental study of PBL in a middle school population. Between- and within-subject comparisons are made of students learning the same material…

Research Findings: The current study examined achievement motivation orientation in preschool-age children from low- and middle-income families. Participants were 126 children who were attending an urban Head Start site or a private preschool. Children's motivation orientation was assessed as being performance oriented or mastery oriented using a…

This study examines the effects of two test administration accommodations on the mathematics performance of students within the context of a large-scale statewide assessment. The two test administration accommodations were resource guides and calculators. A stratified random sample of schools was selected to represent the demographic…

This study examined transactional associations between responses to peer stress and depression in youth. Specifically, it tested the hypotheses that (a) depression would predict fewer effortful responses and more involuntary, dysregulated responses to peer stress over time; and (b) fewer adaptive and more maladaptive responses would predict…

The purpose of this investigation is to determine the incidence of school infrastructure and resources and its impact on the academic performance of primary education students in Latin America. A 4-level multilevel model was applied to the data of the Second Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (SERCE) conducted by UNESCO, which researched…

Early sexual behaviors during adolescence have the potential to lead to unhealthy outcomes. This study explored the association between specific dimensions of maternal relationship quality and adolescent sexual debut by age 15. We hypothesized that adolescents who have poor maternal relationships are at greater risk of early sexual debut than…

Teaching in a classroom configured with computers has been heralded as an aid to learning. Students receive the benefits of working with large data sets and real-world problems. However, with the advent of network and wireless connections, students can now use the computer for alternating tasks, such as emailing, web browsing, and social…

The purpose of this study was to examine how participation in an inquiry-based science program impacts kindergarten students' science learning and motivation. The study was implemented as part of a larger, federally funded research project, the Scientific Literacy Project or SLP (Mantzicopoulos, Patrick, & Samarapungavan, 2005). The study…

The acceleration hypothesis views reading rate simultaneously as both an independent and dependent variable that can be manipulated to encourage increases in reading indicators (Breznitz, 2006). Within this conceptualization, reading rate represents all the component sub-processes required for proficient reading and presents the opportunity for a…

The focus of this study is on the role of achievement goals in students' persistence. The authors administered 5 puzzles to 96 college students: 4 unsolvable and 1 relatively easy (acting as a hope probe). They examined whether and how persistence may deteriorate as a function of failing the puzzles, as well as whether and how persistence may…

In the study described in this article, primary school teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of technology education was measured with a multiple choice test; the Teaching of Technology Test (TTT). The aim of the study was to explore the latent factor structure of PCK, which is considered to be a crucial and distinctive domain of teacher…

State test scores administered for accountability purposes are regularly used to adjust instruction in nuanced ways. This is no accident--No Child Left Behind demanded that students' scores be returned quickly to teachers in order that this might be the case, and the idea of data-driven decision making continues as one way the promise of education…

Examination malpractice or cheating has become a global phenomenon. In different countries of the world today, developed and developing, academic dishonesty especially cheating in examinations has heightened and taken frightening dimension. In many countries of the world this phenomenon has become a serious matter of concern that has left many…