Recent trends in education reform have brought renewed attention to performance character strengths such as grit, growth mindsets, and self-control. In this article, we explore how secondary teachers (Grades 5-12) in a variety of school types understood character education generally, and performance character education specifically. Research…

Purpose: Faced with increasing systemic constraints and pressures, secondary school English teachers often implement transactional approaches to pedagogy and curriculum aimed at improving student results on external exams, which are then used to rank schools. Despite the pressure to teach this way, teachers acknowledge the power of literature,…

Servant Leadership substantiates the truth that through service to others, while leading others, individuals fulfill a longing for living virtuous lives. This study evaluated the impact of a principal preparation program on candidate self-perception of five dispositional skills associated with servant leadership. To determine the impact of the…

Management educators have been advised to cultivate their students' character. Yet they lack the instructional resources they need to do so. We were inspired by the principles and techniques of the Jewish spiritual practice of "Mussar" to put students on a personalized path of continuous character improvement. According to…

Rapid transformation of the workplace and a highly competitive labour market has changed the nature of graduate employability. In addition to discipline related knowledge, students now need to be proactive and adaptable in identifying career opportunities. This paper presents a conceptual model that views employability as determined by an…

Personality characteristics shape human behaviour and influence a wide range of life events and outcomes. They do so not only through their direct effects on life outcomes, but also through their indirect effects on other important personal factors and intermediate life events, such as the development of cognitive capacities, the attainment of…

Student internship plays a major role in transforming the engineering interns to ready-to-use professionals. Learning at the workplace has become a challenge for the interns due to several issues. A knowledge gap analysis has been depicted considering all stakeholders of the internship, including the intern, faculty, institution and the industrial…

Traditional methods of assessing personality traits in medical school selection have been heavily criticised. To address this at the point of selection, "non-cognitive" tests were included in the UK Clinical Aptitude Test, the most widely-used aptitude test in UK medical education (UKCAT: http://www.ukcat.ac.uk/). We examined the…

Accountability mandates often prompt assessment of student learning gains (e.g., value-added estimates) via achievement tests. The validity of these estimates have been questioned when performance on tests is low stakes for students. To assess the effects of motivation on value-added estimates, we assigned students to one of three test consequence…

Previous research has highlighted the important role of choice in listeners' responses to music, but relatively little is known about the subjective criteria on which listeners base their choices. Hence, the goal of this study was to make a first attempt to investigate the relative importance of various criteria in listeners' choice and aesthetic…

This study addresses why women are underrepresented in Computer Science (CS). Data from 1319 American first-year college students (872 female and 447 male) indicate that gender differences in computer self-efficacy, stereotypes, interests, values, interpersonal orientation, and personality exist. If students had had a positive experience in their…

Research nationally and internationally found that technical graduates are lacking in employability skills. As employability skills are crucial in outcome-based education, the main goal of this research is to develop an Employability Skill Assessment Tool to help students and lecturers produce competent graduates in employability skills needed by…

Various policy papers and research studies assert that teamwork is one of the most important skills for students to learn if they are to become meaningful contributors to the 21st century workforce. However, outside of organizational psychology and adult populations, few reliable assessments of this construct exist, with suitable validity evidence…

A seven item Likert-type scale was developed to measure self-righteousness, defined as the conviction that one's beliefs and actions are correct, especially in contrast to the beliefs and actions of others. The Self Righteousness Questionnaire (SRQ) measures three components of self-righteousness: belittlement, acceptance, and uncertainty. The…

This paper describes a qualitative research study that investigated strategies used by urban teachers to build their personal resilience. Sixteen resilient teachers from four urban districts that reported student achievement equal to or higher than the state average on standard tests of reading and mathematics were interviewed. The definition of…