The positive relationship between students' attitudes toward mathematics and mathematics achievement is well documented. Yet there is a worsening problem of low appeal of mathematics especially at the secondary level. Therefore, in this paper we focus on three high school students who report a strong dislike of mathematics. By analyzing student…

School discipline research has demonstrated that the labeling of student behaviors as requiring disciplinary action is a selective process in which school staff take into account other factors than the characteristics of the behaviors. We argue that school staff react in a disciplinary way to students with negative attitudes toward the educational…

Gang involvement is associated with many negative outcomes. However, the social and emotional development of gang-involved youth has received little empirical investigation. This study examines the social and emotional outcomes of gang-involved youth. Data come from the 2009 Fairfax County Youth Survey administered to eighth, 10th, and 12th grade…

Background: Although school climate is linked with youth educational, socioemotional, behavioral, and health outcomes, there has been limited research on the association between school climate and mental health education efforts. This study explored whether school climate was associated with students' depression literacy and mental health stigma…

Using the draw-a-picture technique, the authors explored the learning conceptions held by students across grade levels. A total of 1,067 Taiwanese students in Grades 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12 participated in this study. Participants were asked to use drawing to illustrate how they conceptualize learning. A coding checklist was developed to analyze…

Background: Although school climate is linked with youth educational, socioemotional, behavioral, and health outcomes, there has been limited research on the association between school climate and mental health education efforts. We explored whether school climate was associated with students' depression literacy and mental health stigma beliefs.…

The purpose of this study is to compare changes in attitudes of students about their study of biology in the classes thought by five biology teachers who experienced an Iowa Chautauqua workshop with and two non-Chautauqua teachers who had no experience with any professional development program. The results indicated that there are significant…

This study used quantitative methods to investigate motivation to read among high school students in a tenth-grade English course at a rural high school in the Midwestern USA. Data were collected and analyzed to replicate previous studies. In this study, when compared to large-scale surveys, respondents showed more positive attitudes toward…

Poorer outcomes for youth labeled with learning disabilities (LDs) are often attributed to the student's own deficiencies or cumulative disadvantage; but the more troubling possibility is that special education placement limits rather than expands these students' opportunities. Labeling theory partially attributes the poorer outcomes of…

The purpose of this single community qualitative case study was to determine how the voice of the student was present in the IEP process, documentation paperwork, and curricular and diagnostic decisions, among a group of seven students, grades 9 through 12, placed in a self-contained program for students with emotional disabilities in a suburban…

Monitoring the Future (MTF) is a long-term study of American adolescents, college students, and adults through age 50. It has been conducted annually by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research since its inception in 1975 and is supported under a series of investigator-initiated, competing research grants from the National…

The literature on students' attitudinal constructs in science education asserts that students hold dichotomous attitudes toward science (AS). For instance, studies from the Relevance of Science Education project reveal that students possess negative attitudes in terms of their favourableness toward school science, preference toward scientific…

Many models in science education have tried to clarify the causal relationships of affective variables on student performance, by presenting theoretical models, exploratory SEM (structural equation models), and confirmatory SEM. Based on the literature, the recent AS-TI-CU model scrutinised the most robust stimuli of conceptual understanding (CU):…

The Monitoring the Future (MTF) study is an ongoing series of national surveys of American adolescents and adults that has provided the nation with a vital window into the important, but largely hidden, problem behaviors of illegal drug use, alcohol use, tobacco use, anabolic steroid use, and psychotherapeutic drug use. For more than a third of a…

This study examined effects of adolescent males' perceptions of being bullied because of verbal taunts related to gender nonconformity (i.e., "They say I'm gay"). Participants included 251 ninth- (n=77), tenth- (n=96), and eleventh- (n=78) grade students in a private, all-male college preparatory school. Participants were divided into two groups…