A benefit of the increasing participation in online professional development courses is the ability for such courses to reach a wide variety of educators, despite geographic distance. Along with this benefit comes the challenge of ensuring that such courses can engage learners from diverse backgrounds. The current study investigates educators'…

The present study examined an international sample of adults from the Survey of Adult Skills administered by the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2009) to assess (1) how specific individual and country-level characteristics predict adult readiness to…

This study, drawing on data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009, explored the influences of metacognitive and self-regulated learning strategies for reading on mathematical literacy of adolescents in Australia and Singapore. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses revealed the positive influences of…

While overall, more than 20% of youths are unemployed, more than 50% of minority youths are unemployed. To examine the demographic characteristics of successful and unsuccessful enrollees at the Southwestern Job Corps Center, 125 youths (85 classified as successful, 40 classified as unsuccessful based on their status 9 months after data…

A study investigated the effects of mass media, interpersonal communication, and sociolinguistic background on adults' political, cultural, and economic attitudes and agendas. Data for the study came from two earlier research efforts: one conducted in Minnesota, involved 414 adults who were interviewed concerning their media use, interpersonal…

This study examined the relationship between psychological separation and college adjustment in a Chicano/Latino sample, a group which has traditionally not valued psychological separation (N=137). Ethnic identity as a moderator variable was also explored. The Psychological Separation Inventory, Student Adjustment to College Questionnaire, and the…

This study investigated the role of emotional skills in the academic achievement and retention of university freshmen. The research group was a randomly selected sample of first semester freshmen students (N=165), and cumulative grade point average was used as the criterion for academic success. The study was designed to investigate: (a) the…

School motivation and achievement for an individual is the product of a complex set of interacting goals, goals which may be more or less significant to individuals from different cultural backgrounds. This paper describes a project which examines the nature of goals held by students from different cultural groups, the compatibility of these goals…

This paper was intended to promote a deeper understanding of a statistical method called balancing developed by National Assessment of Educational Progress. Problems in estimating main effects when populations are disproportionate, balancing solutions to these problems, methods equivalent to balancing, interpretation of balanced results, and some…

Coping skills and work motivation were investigated as predictors of academic achievement in Japan, West Germany, and Austin, Texas. Data were gathered from a sample of 3,600 ten and fourteen-year olds. Aptitude was measured by the Raven Progressive Matrices; achievement was measured by standardized tests in reading and mathematics, and by grade…

Structural equation models incorporating unmeasured variables make possible the rigorous testing of theories previously difficult to test adequately because of fallible measures of the theoretic variables. This paper first discusses a simple causal model; incorporating a single unmeasured variable for the purpose of exposition. A substantive…

This study compared Chinese-American and Caucasian-American children and families in order to better understand which cultural and family characteristics, parent beliefs, and parent practices operate at the early childhood level to produce the more uniform high level of math achievement among Asian-American children. Forty second-generation…