This study draws on self-determination theory to conceptualize a type of school climate that has consequences for the social, emotional, and cognitive well-being of students. We argue that a self-regulated climate emerges through a general pattern of interactions that students experience as supporting their psychological needs. For the empirical…

To better understand the role that ways of reasoning play in students' success on integer addition and subtraction problems, we examined the relationship between students' flexible use of ways of reasoning and their performance on integers open number sentences. Within groups of students in 3 participant groups--39 2nd and 4th graders who had…

Over a period of about 3 years, 3204 students in Grades 4 to 10 completed 9862 tests to identify and track their interpretation of decimal notation. Analysis of the longitudinal data demonstrates that different misconceptions persist among students to different degrees and in different patterns across the grades. Estimating the prevalence of…

The purpose of this study was to determine what, or part of what, makes academic success probable or improbable for a student. The core research question was, Which practices, characteristics, and circumstances of students, families, schools, school districts, and communities tend to give Maine students a higher probability of meeting state…

This study is an attempt to determine if it is possible to establish causal direction between academic self-concept and academic achievement, focusing on whether academic self-concept and the subject-matter self-concepts of English and mathematics serve to generate academic, English, and mathematics achievements, respectively. This study of causal…

A comparison was made of student understandings of marine science and marine resource concepts in two geographically distant but similar sociocultural regions of the United States. The study is based on the nature of ecological events, students' understanding in the context of meaningful learning, and the cultural context in which learning takes…

Intended as an aid for English teachers in planning a senior-year composition program that takes into account both the strengths and the weaknesses in the writing of their students, an analysis of teacher evaluations of student writings (the Early English Composition Assessment Program--EECAP) is conducted annually by the Ohio Writing Project.…

This study investigated whether alcohol use by public school students differs in its relationship to other variables when analyzed on the individual level versus the aggregated group level. The study presents a model and a set of analytic techniques for studying the ways that school and individual variables relate to adolescent alcohol abuse.…

The relationship between school-level minimum competency testing (MCT) programs and student reading proficiency measured by the 1983-84 National Assessment of Educational Progress was studied in subsamples of 10,367 fourth graders, 10,829 eighth graders, and 13,513 eleventh graders. No advantages of MCT programs were seen in grade 4. (SLD)

The responses of elementary and secondary students drawn from two school districts, one with a student population that is primarily African American and the other with a student population that is primarily Caucasian, were analyzed to examine student perceptions of teacher influence. A total of 682 students (388 fifth graders and 294 eleventh…

This study represents the first to empirically validate the structure of social self-concept (SC) as proposed by the Shavelson model. For each of three age groups--preadolescents (252 3rd graders), early adolescents (290 7th graders), and late adolescents (335 11th graders)--analyses of covariance structures were used to test: (1) that social SC…

The purposes of this study were to: (1) assess the present level of scientific literacy of students in twelve public school systems in Georgia on an abbreviated form of the "National Assessment of Educational Progress Science Test"; (2) compare the performance of these students on specific test items with the performance of…

Recent trends in achievement test scores among elementary and secondary school students in Iowa are examined. Form 7 of the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) was used to measure the achievement of students in grades 3 and 7; and Form X-7 of the Iowa Tests of Educational Development (ITED) was used for 11th graders. These grade levels were chosen…

This study investigated the use of teacher perceptions of school effectiveness variables as part of the Pennsylvania state assessment program and briefly reviewed the teacher survey instrument development. Data were available for 155 of the 500 school districts from the 1985 Educational Quality Assessment administration. A norm sample included 111…