The present study investigated the mediating role of career adaptability in the relationship between youth-perceived contextual support and positive youth development on the basis of a survey of 1,047 students in 10th to 12th grades. Measurement model analysis revealed that career search self-efficacy (CSSE), goal capacity, academic self-efficacy,…

This paper presents a revised learning progression for the energy concept and initial findings on diverse progressions among subgroups of sample students. The revised learning progression describes how students progress towards an understanding of the energy concept along two progress variables identified from previous studies--key ideas about…

The concurrent and longitudinal associations between popularity, likeability, and prosocial behavior were evaluated in this three-year study of middle school and high school Chinese adolescents. The initial sample included 766 middle school (mean age = 13.3 years) and 668 high school participants (mean age = 16.6 years); there were 880 (399 girls)…

The purpose of this study was to examine factors associated with career preparation of high school students in four countries: China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. The human bioecological theory was used as a framework to examine personal, process, and context factors associated with career preparation of the adolescents. Data were…

Background: Deficient sleep is linked to detrimental outcomes in health and school performance for adolescents. This study characterized sleep patterns in Chinese adolescents preparing for the College Entrance Exam (CEE) and evaluated the association between sleep patterns, self-rated academic performance, and the CEE scores. Methods: A sample of…

Critical thinking is a unifying goal of modern education. While past research has mostly examined the efficacy of a single instructional approach to teaching critical thinking, recent literature has begun discussing mixed teaching approaches. The present study examines three modes of instruction, featuring the direct instruction approach and the…

According to theory, students' implicit theories of ability can affect their motivation and engagement in physical education (PE). Limited research has been conducted to examine the relationships between implicit theories of ability and motivation and engagement among K-12 students in PE. Our study examined the relationship between implicit…

This study explores how contextual factors affect the instructional reaction of teachers to the changes in the high-stake testing. The results obtained from an investigation of 11 teachers from five senior middle schools show that contextual factors can be categorized into three, namely, traditional exam culture, leadership at district and school…

By incorporating psychopathology and subjective well-being (SWB), the dual-factor model of mental health (DFM) can comprehensively measure psychological health. We examined the utility of the DFM among 1,293 Chinese adolescents (Grades 7-12). Furthermore, we examined the dynamics of mental health group membership via a two-wave longitudinal study…

This article assessed the measurement in variance of the Adolescent Student Burnout Inventory (ASBI) across gender and educational track, and investigated the main and interaction effects of gender and educational track on the facets of student burnout with a sample consisting of 2,216 adolescent students from China. Multigroup confirmatory factor…

This study investigates the consistency between human raters and an automated essay scoring system in grading high school students' English compositions. A total of 923 essays from 23 classes of 12 senior high schools in Taiwan (Republic of China) were obtained and scored manually and electronically. The results show that the consistency between…

This paper reports a cross-grade comparative study of Chinese precollege students' epistemological beliefs about physics by using the Colorado Learning Attitudes Survey about Sciences (CLASS). Our students of interest are middle and high schoolers taking traditional lecture-based physics as a mandatory science course each year from the 8th grade…

The huge technological improvement in data processing and the globalization have increased the demand for and the supply of indices that quantify the consequences of a policy. However, there are certain cases in which quantification may be misleading in the sense that it gives the impression of an accurate measurement while in reality it is not.…

This study reports findings from an analysis of the 2002 Chinese National Physics Curriculum Guidelines and the alignment between the curriculum guidelines and two most recent provincial-level 12th-grade exit examinations in China. Both curriculum guidelines and test content were represented using two-dimensional matrices (i.e., topic by level of…

A total of three hundred and fifteen (n = 315) gifted students from the 10th and 12th grade from the United States (n = 102), China (n = 125) and Germany (n = 88) were surveyed regarding their motivation and self-regulation in chemistry learning. A 3 x 2 x 2 MANOVA revealed "nation" as having the largest major effect on these variables.…