Academic cheating within the middle grades has become a prevalent schooling dilemma for teachers and administrators. Among the various contextual and cognitive factors that promote academic cheating is home-school dissonance, which has been shown to predict the phenomenon among high school students. The current study extends this line of research…

This mixed-methods study examined the relationship between middle level science students' perceptions of teacher-student interactions and students' science motivation, particulary their efficacy, value, and goal orientation for learning science. In this sequential explanatory design, quantitative and qualitative data were collected in two phases,…

This study investigated the proposal that (a) contextual and personal factors affect the endorsement of social goals during early adolescence and (b) contextual factors and social goals may change over time. Self-reports of classroom contextual factors (i.e., promotion of performance goals, social interaction, and mutual respect) and personal…

What type of work goals provide adolescents with the sense that schoolwork is important and that their lives are meaningful? This mixed-methods study of a diverse sample of 6th-, 9th-, and 12th-grade adolescents (N = 148) investigated the relationship between work goals, purpose, and meaning using a semistructured interview and a survey. Interview…

Educology is the fund of knowledge about the educational process, which obviously occurs within and outside of schools. Educology includes, at the least, the fund of knowledge about past education (historical educology), about current states of affairs in education (scientific educology), about effective practices within education (praxiological…