This study examined relations between student engagement and drug use using data obtained from the statewide biennial California Healthy Kids Survey. Latent variable modeling with confirmatory factor analysis indicated four conceptually distinct and psychometrically sound factors capturing academic motivation, school connectedness, caring…

While substantial research has shown the relationship between earlier mathematics coursetaking and later mathematics achievement, recent research suggests that mathematics motivation is an important predictor of grade 12 mathematics achievement as well. The current study extends this research by examining the role of mathematics identity at grade…

This study aims to investigate the patterns of students' performance in inductive reasoning, scientific reasoning and science motivation at different grade levels. We also examined the interaction of these variables with parental factors in predicting students' STEM achievement. A cross-sectional study assessed 726 participants from the 6th, 8th,…

This study uses the overlap sample of about 3,500 students who participated both in the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09) and the 2013 Grade 12 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) mathematics assessment to investigate how mathematics motivation (mathematics identity, mathematics self-efficacy, and mathematics…

This study aims at investigating the direct effects of three motivation factors, self-efficacy, task value, and mastery goal orientation, and a deep cognitive strategy, critical thinking skills on students' mathematical reasoning ability. Besides, the study focuses on the examination of the mediating effects of critical thinking skills on the…

Among a sample of 472 Indigenous high school students, juxtaposed with 15,884 non-Indigenous students from the same 54 schools, we investigated variation in motivation and engagement from school to school, and the role of motivation and engagement in predicting various academic outcomes (aspirations, buoyancy, homework completion, and…

We examined the impact of adolescents' popularity motivations on their involvement in relational aggression perpetration and victimization, heavy drinking, and antiauthority behavior, while also considering the role of teens' perception of their own popularity and psychosocial adjustment. High school students (N = 986; 50% female; M[subscript age]…

The role of mastery and performance goals in self-regulated learning (SRL) has received much attention. However, in collectivist and Confucian-heritage contexts, social-academic goals may also play an important, yet unexamined role in SRL. This study examined the association between social-academic goals and SRL. We tested a hierarchical model…

A relatively large number of South African learners drop out of school during the last 2 years of high school. This has important negative consequences for the individual learners, as well as for the country as a whole since it contributes greatly to the high number of unskilled and unemployed people. This study was carried out to explore whether,…

Recent research on achievement in science asserts that motivation, emotion, and metacognition are important driving forces for learning. This study sought to examine the relationships between two physics class emotions (hope and anxiety), their motivational predictors (instrumentality and self-efficacy), and their effects on metacognitive problem…

Research has shown that students in Advanced Placement (AP) classes and International Baccalaureate (IB) programs experience higher levels of stress compared to students in general education classes. Elevated stress can serve as a risk factor for students' academic and mental health problems. Given the documented stress of these students,…

Introduction: Students are daily exposed to a variety of assessment tasks in the classroom. It has long been recognized that students' perceptions of the assessment tasks may influence student academic achievement. The present study aimed at predicting academic achievement in mathematics from perceptions of the assessment tasks after controlling…

Education is one of the strongest predictors of health worldwide. In South Africa, school dropout is a crisis where by Grade 12, only 52% of the age appropriate population remain enrolled. Survival analysis was used to identify the risk of dropping out of secondary school for male and female adolescents and examine the influence of substance use…

In this study, the relationship between students' interest in engineering design activities and their expectancy for success in grades 9-12 was evaluated. The theoretical frameworks developed by Eccles and colleagues (i.e., expectancy value) and Butler and Cartier (i.e., what the students bring to contexts under a self-regulated learning…

This study examines models of variables posited to predict students' homework motivation management (HMM), based on survey data from 866 8th graders (61 classes) and 745 11th graders (46 classes) in the south-eastern USA. Most of the variance in HMM occurred at the student level, with parent education as the only significant predictor at the class…