Social cognitive theory suggests that individuals' beliefs about their efficacy in specific contexts, such as school, influence their motivation in those settings. The relationship between various sociocultural factors and the development of adolescents' perceived academic self-efficacy are investigated in this paper. Participants (N=202), drawn…

The last two decades have seen an increase in the demand for information about school effectiveness. For this paper, school effectiveness is defined as the value-added effectiveness. Value-added indices measure achievement over and above what would have been expected from attendance at a comparable school. They assess school effectiveness after…

Explores the following five dimensions of self-perception held by black urban male 10th-grade students in North Carolina: (1) scholastic competence; (2) athletic competence; (3) physical appearance; (4) behavioral conduct; and (5) job competence. Investigates differences in these aspects of self-concept for 30 students scoring above and 30 scoring…

This study is part of an on-going research project to assess differences in educational attainment when controlling for race, sex, and socioeconomic status. The National Educational Longitudinal Survey (NELS) 1988 of 8th graders and a survey of 10th graders, High School and Beyond 1980-82 (HSB), were utilized to obtain data that were then…

Data from the 1988 Phi Delta Kappa National Research Study on at-risk students were used in an analysis of variables associated with being classified as "at risk." The study collected information on over 22,000 at-risk and not-at-risk students from 274 schools and 9,600 teachers from across the United States. This analysis identified…

Designed to focus on teaching for higher-level cognitive learning, this study measured student perceptions of psychosocial aspects of their classroom learning and involved a team of six researchers. The study consisted of an intensive 10-week investigation of two above-average science teachers in a suburban high school in Perth, Western Australia.…

This study investigated the role of knowledge base organization in elementary school students' memory performance. In a preliminary study, students in grades 2, 6, and 10 rated words from three semantic categories for their category representativeness. Results disclosed age-related changes in how children rate words for high and low typicality.…

Locus of control, a generalized belief about causality in one's personal life, was identified as a potential variable impinging upon the acquisition of science-related attitudes in classes of high school students from 10th grade biology, and 11th and 12th grade chemistry, and of college elementary education majors. Correlations of the…

The present study, using a sample of 1,491 grade 10 students from a mid-western province in Canada, examined the validity evidence on the Canadian Tests of Basic Skills. Factor analysis of the 34 micro-skills (content by skill/process classification of items) of the four tests indicated that the Reading Comprehension, Written Expression, and Using…

The unit of study offered in this paper is designed to guide the analysis of a representative sample of modern fiction from four English-speaking countries: the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. Annotations of six novels are offered to show both how their main characters are young people coping with an intensely painful problem…

Approximately 700 Mexican American and Anglo students in grades 9, 10, and 11, who were identified as having superior mathematical ability, were surveyed to identify the factors affecting mathematics participation, determine the relative importance of these factors, and determine their stability over time. Five variables were studied: cognitive…

The present study tried to find out whether Saudi history textbooks for grades 4-12 contain global themes, in which grade levels global themes are introduced, the percentage of global themes, local history themes and Islamic history themes, and which global history themes are taught. A checklist of global history themes was developed. Those are:…

Background: The Hawaii Department of Education (HDOE) launched its Hawaii State Assessment (HSA) in spring, 2002, within the context of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) Act of 2001 and its mandates to close the "achievement gaps" between subgroups of students. Thus, it is important to investigate the extent to which student…

The purpose of the study was to identify and compare the learning style preferences of low-achieving and high-achieving young African-American males. Measures of perceptual preferences for 22 learning modalities were obtained from a sample of 50 ninth- and tenth-grade students. Half of the students were randomly selected from a pool identified as…

A new test theory for performance-based assessment is proposed. Criteria for "good" performance-based items, ways of measuring cognitive complexity, methods for determining maturity levels of understanding, and scaling systems are discussed. A performance-based task completed by 51 ninth and tenth graders in June 1993 was studied.…