This monograph provides educational researchers, policymakers, and practitioners with an overview of existing knowledge regarding factors that influence success among racial and ethnic minority students in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) circuit. To accomplish this task, the authors reviewed more than four hundred…

Institutions that have organized and centralized their data enjoy an obvious advantage in grappling with strategic planning and other issues. As the drumbeat for accountability, planning, and demonstrating effectiveness to internal and external stakeholders intensifies, the stature and importance of institutional research offices on most campuses…

Research on performance appraisals has often overlooked the importance of attitudinal and organizational variables. To test a model of the influence of organizational contextual variables on the perceived utility of performance appraisals, 239 Virginia mental health workers completed a questionnaire. The 21 items were designed to measure the four…

A model is presented in which a test score is influenced by three factors: (1) the test itself, including the nature of the item tryout samples, the nature of the standardization group, the item scaling model and methods, the manner of item subset generation, logical strategies in test building, the format of questions, the test appearance, item…

Move sequence analysis revealed that, when presented with problems having subgoals difficult to order, 40 preschoolers between 45 and 70 months of age (1) tended to avoid backup; (2) were sensitive to incremental progress toward a goal; and (3) searched moves ahead for a goal. None of several indices of performance were reliably correlated with…

This article presents a queuing model simulation of scientific productivity utilizing critical path analysis. Creativity is found to have a large positive effect, a negative effect, or no effect on productivity, depending on the stage of the problem-solving process to which it is applied and the nature of the bottlenecks inherent to the specific…

Reveals that different aspects of the environment differentially contributed to variability in communication performance of one-year-old infants. Findings support the environmental specificity hypothesis and underline the need to consider physical environmental parameters when investigating environmental influences. (Author/RH)

Acquiring the norm of altruism is conceived as a three-step process involving presocialization, awareness that others value altruistic behavior, and internalization of the norm. The present studies investigated how first-, second-, and third-grade children attain the second step. Attainment, occurring around second grade, was a function of…

Causal attribution theory, including the concept of learned helplessness, has been used to explain student motivation and achievement in school. In this paper, a model is developed which explains how attribution theory could explain student effort and achievement in mathematics. According to the model, student perceptions of success or failure in…

This paper presents an economic model of the relationship between time allocated to learning activities at home and achievement in school. The model is contrasted to four alternative models of the home-school relationship. Data from a 1975 survey of the parents of 887 elementary school children from one New York State school district are used to…

Although previous research on perception of work environment has focused on the underlying structure of the environment, perception of a specific event can indicate whether a three-dimensional model (prediction, understanding, and control) or a two-dimensional model (information and control) accounts for the individual's perception in terms of…

Discusses issues making developmental studies of forgetting difficult to interpret: (1) stages-of-learning confounds, (2) failure to separate forgetting from performance factors operating on retention tests, and (3) failure to disentangle contributions of storage-based and retrieval-based forgetting to retention test performance. A paradigm and…

By varying task conditions and constraints on subjects, this study attempted to extend and refine a developmental theory of partitioning as a foundational process undergirding children's construction of a rational number. Subjects were 31 preponderantly higher-grade pupils enrolled at an elementary school in Nova Scotia, Canada. Two tasks were…

This report incorporates a literature review, a workshop paper, and discussion by workshop participants on the current status of research on what the users of computer systems know, and how these different forms of knowledge fit together in learning and performance. It is noted that such research is important to the problem of designing systems…

Discusses results of a meta-analysis which sought to identify those variables found in research as strongly correlated with responsible environmental behavior. Variables found significant were: knowledge of issues; knowledge of action strategies; locus of control; attitudes; verbal commitment; and sense of responsibility. Proposes a model of…