Nonformal adult education (NFE) provides adults with the opportunity to obtain competences needed to adapt to today's changing job market. Despite the well-documented positive effects of NFE, there remains a lack of valid research instruments to assess factors of nonparticipation. Specifically, defining the perspectives of social groups with the…

Online learning has become a popular alternative to traditional schools, allowing flexible schedules and availability of accelerated programs. In spite of the positive attributes, online education faces some challenges, such as assessing student engagement, seen as an indicator of academic excellence. The literature reveals that existing…

Amidst the ethnic and linguistic diversity in adult English language classes, there is heightened importance to using culturally responsive teaching practices. However, there are limited quantitative examinations of this approach in adult learning environments. The purpose of this investigation was to describe patterns of culturally responsive…

Social support is protective for a variety of health outcomes, and individuals living outside their country of origin ("sojourners") might use social support in distinctive ways. The authors performed a confirmatory factor analysis of the 18-item Index of Sojourner Social Support (ISSS) using data obtained from 190 Spanish-speaking…

Research Findings: Emotional and social competence are critical to a child's current and future well-being. A. D. Paterson et al. (2012) studied a sample of mothers and proposed that an adult's approach to the socialization of a child's emotions can be summarized in his or her parenting style as measured by the Emotion-Related Parenting Styles…

The Classroom Community Scale (CCS) has been utilized in previous research to measure sense of community of learners including those learners in blended learning environments. In the current study, the CCS was examined with respect to its psychometric properties in the blended learning environment. Reliability analyses indicate an acceptable level…

The present study examined the validity of the Basic Empathy Scale (BES) [Jolliffe, D., & Farrington, D. P. (2006a). Development and validation of the Basic Empathy Scale. "Journal of Adolescence," 29, 589-611; Jolliffe, D., & Farrington, D. P. (2006b). Examining the relationship between low empathy and bullying. "Aggressive…

The purposes of this study were to investigate the reliability and construct validity of measures of reading component skills with a sample of adult basic education (ABE) learners, including both native and nonnative English speakers, and to describe the performance of those learners on the measures. Investigation of measures of reading components…

This is the first study to test whether the stages of change of the transtheoretical model are qualitatively different through exploring discontinuity patterns in theory of planned behavior (TPB) variables using latent multigroup structural equation modeling (MSEM) with AMOS. Discontinuity patterns in terms of latent means and prediction patterns…

Academic advisors help students with the process of decision making, of making sense of their world, of understanding how they go about learning, and of understanding how to appreciate diversity in their world. If advisors are to help students in these areas, academic advisors should be aware of the cognitive processes of how they make sense of…