The study aims at investigating students' learning/defence profiles. It also explores students' profiles during different years of study. Participants comprised of 425 undergraduates. They completed the 'Approaches to Study and Skills Inventory' and the 'Defense Style Questionnaire'. The students' academic achievement was measured through grade…

This research investigated the statistical predictive power of organisational commitments for academics' teaching approaches. Participants were 268 academics working in six elite universities in Beijing, mainland China. Results showed that academics' organisational commitments as measured by the Organisational Commitment Inventory significantly…

During the past decade, research on the constructive learning process has been conducted mainly from two perspectives: student approaches to learning (SAL) and self-regulated learning (SRL). The SAL perspective has highlighted the role of learning conceptions with respect to other topics involved in constructive learning processes, whereas…

This study was designed to explore the effects of different geographical background contexts and signalling for information about global warming on comprehension, recall and cognitive load. Two different geographical contexts, US and Korean, were employed to frame explanations of global warming phenomena to US students. Two signalling conditions…

Language learning failure is often directly related to demotivation. The purpose of this study is to examine the process of demotivation and identify its sources within four years of an undergraduate degree programme. To this end, based on the complex dynamic systems perspective of the dynamic systems theories (DSTs), the demotivation test battery…

This study focused on investigating the types of schooling beliefs (teaching and learning) expressed through metaphorical images by prospective teachers (PTs) from the United States. Participants (N = 215) rated 10 schooling metaphors illustrating the "student-school-teacher" relationships (i.e. "Passenger-Bus-Driver"; Student…

The aim of the current study was to obtain information from students in higher education on different motivational profiles that resulted from the combination of three academic goals (i.e. learning goals (LG), performance-approach goals and performance-avoidance goals). Moreover, information related to the relevance of each goal within each…

The rapid growth in popularity of social networking sites has spurred research exploring the impact of usage in a variety of areas. The current study furthered this line of research by examining the relationships between social network usage and adjustment to college in the academic, social, personal-emotional and university affiliation domains.…

The development of effective self-regulated learning strategies is of interest to educationalists. In this paper, we examine inherent individual difference in self-regulated learning based on Motivated Learning for Learning Questionnaire (MLSQ) using the cluster analytic approach and examine cluster difference in terms of self-determination theory…

This research tested the relationship between individuals cultural values and the malleability in their ways of knowing in two social contexts. Two hundred and ninety-two college students majoring in either business or social sciences initially received two priming conditions (two weeks apart) where they reflected on either their in-group or their…

The present study examined the association between students' perceived general learning environment and their thinking styles (a specific term for "intellectual styles"). Seven hundred and fifty-two undergraduates in Shanghai responded to the Thinking Style Inventory-Revised II and the Inventory of Students' Perceived Learning…