Background: Research has shown that motivation is a key factor in the learning process as well as in school achievement. In essence, a number of researchers have highlighted the close link between motivation and achievement-related behaviours such as effort. Aims: The present study aims to acquire more specific information concerning the relations…

Background: The prevalence of smoking among Chinese adolescents has dramatically increased in recent years. The purpose of this study was to examine the differences in smoking-related knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors among Chinese students in 3 types of secondary schools. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted among 3957 students of…

The high school transition was examined in an ethnically diverse, urban sample of 1,979 adolescents, followed from 7th to 10th grade (M[subscript age] = 14.6, SD = 0.37 in 7th grade). Twice annually, data were gathered on adolescents' perceptions of school climate, psychological functioning, and academic behaviors. Piecewise growth modeling…

Shares the thinking of one seventh-grade student about his discovery concerning Pythagorean triples during the study of the Pythagorean theorem. (MKR)

In this study it was aimed to i) diagnose the topics that are perceived as difficult at the level of 6-8 science classes and ii) find out the reasons behind of these difficulties as well as propose suggestions to remedy these difficulties. Eighteen science teachers and three hundred students attending different types of secondary schools…

Reports the results of a teaching experiment involving like terms and equations in algebra. Seventh-grade students (n=6) experienced difficulties in decomposing an additive term into a difference. (Author/MKR)

Describes procedures, results, and conclusions of a study designed to determine if instruction on excluding irrelevant variables enhanced learning the principle of flotation. The subjects were 97 seventh grade, 259 eighth grade, and 38 college students. Results indicate that learning to exclude the false principles before learning the correct…

The purpose of this study was to explore whether or not adolescents who are deemed underachievers and who struggle to read school-assigned textbooks will engage with popular culture texts of their own choosing (e.g., magazines, comics, TV, video games, music CDs, graffiti, e-mail, and other Internet-mediated texts). The 60 student participants,…

Describes and evaluates the effectiveness of an alcohol-prevention program. Results suggest that parents will read and use information mailed to them. Although parents and children talked more about alcohol-related topics, changes in other parenting behaviors and in student self-reported alcohol use were not observed. (RJM)

In recent years in Spain there has been a growing popular concern as well as research interest in the study of social relations pertaining to coexistence at school, including a desire to know the real incidence and nature of conflicts involved. Thus, a great variety of school interventions have been underway, with the aim of reducing the…

To study the effect of a teachers' ban on supervising sports-related extracurricular physical activities (ECAs), levels of physical activity among 979 grade 7 students (mean age = 12.7 [0.5] years at baseline) were compared during and after the ban in seven schools that fully implemented the ban, and three schools that did not implement the ban…

Investigating the effect of sentence-combining practice on the syntactic maturity of written compositions and on reading comprehension, this study involved assignment of seventh grade students to control and experimental groups. Analysis was based on the experimental group's completion of 26 sentence-combining problems (O'Hare's format with some…

The memory performance of 30 seventh and 30 eleventh graders was examined as a function of instructional conditions on two different cued recall tasks. The relationship between meta-memory and actual performance during adolescence was studied. Results concern performance based on elaborative prompting, controlled instructions, and the students'…

Objective: To ascertain the association between pubertal stage and deliberate self-harm. Method: Cross-sectional survey of 12- to 15-year-olds in 300 secondary schools in the U.S. state of Washington in February-April 2002 and the Australian state of Victoria in June-August 2002. A total of 3,332 students in grades 7 and 9 provided complete data…