This paper is the first to examine the Reading and Writing Self-Efficacy Scale among incarcerated adults. The aim was to examine whether performance of reading and spelling tests (Reading Speed, Nonsense Words and Spelling) explained individual differences in the participants' efficacy beliefs in reading and writing. Six hundred subjects rated…

Previous research has established that justice-involved youth have higher rates of both learning disabilities and mental health disorders compared to youth in the community. Both need areas raise substantial intervention and rehabilitation concerns that must be addressed via educational and mental health service plans. The current study…

The study examined how cognitive and motivational factors predicted reading skill and whether intrinsic reading motivation would explain significantly more variance in low ability readers' reading performance. One hundred and eleven children (aged 9-11) completed assessments of reading comprehension skill, verbal IQ, decoding skill and intrinsic…

Recent cognitive psychological research has argued that involuntary mental time travel is an important individual difference variable that has the potential to affect an individual's motivation. However, this issue has not been empirically investigated in educational settings such as teacher education. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the…

Many theories of giftedness either explicitly or implicitly acknowledge the role of genetic influences; yet, empirical work has not been able to establish the impact that genes have specifically on gifted behavior. In contrast, a great deal of research has been targeted at understanding the etiology of individual differences in general and…

Working memory refers to a mental workspace, involved in controlling, regulating, and actively maintaining relevant information to accomplish complex cognitive tasks (e.g. mathematical processing). Despite the potential relevance of a relation between working memory and math for understanding developmental and individual differences in…

Individual differences in solution strategies have frequently been reported for different measures of mental rotation (MR) ability. In the present study (N=346 German students), we investigated the relationship between solution strategies on two tests commonly used to identify different patterns of strategies: the Mental Rotations Test (MRT;…

This study aimed at modeling individual and average non-linear trajectories of positional learning using a structured latent growth curve approach. The model is based on an exponential function which encompasses three parameters: Initial performance, learning rate, and asymptotic performance. These learning parameters were compared in a positional…

The present study investigated whether the marked sex difference in the original mental rotation test (MRT) is simply a result of sex differences in response strategies. Thirty-four participants (17 males, 17 females) completed the revised Vandenberg and Kuse MRT [Peters, M., Laeng, B., Latham, K., Jackson, M., Zaiyouna, R., & Richardson, C.…

The influence of gender beliefs on cognitive task performance has been demonstrated repeatedly for adults. For children, there is evidence that gender beliefs can substantially impede or boost math performance--a task where gender differences in favour of boys declined over past decades. Therefore, we examined this phenomenon using the Mental…

To learn if Protestant ethic endorsement predicted intelligence controlling for the big five personality factors, 364 college students from England and the United States completed a 65-item multifaceted work ethic endorsement measure, the 50-item Wonderlic Personnel Test, and a 60-item measure of the big five personality factors. A hierarchical…

Expectations about self-competence and difficulty of a task to be undertaken can foster motivation and hence affect engagement, giving rise to individual differences in performance. This effect was examined in a memory task. An increase in recall performance following instructions about high competence was hypothesised; in addition, a modulating…

This study investigated cross-cultural differences on 38 subscales from 4 major domains--personality, social attitudes, values, and social norms. These scales were administered to participants who took the Test of English as a Foreign Language[TM] (TOEFL[R], N = 1,600) and U.S. college students (N = 429). Total variability of each subscale was…

With the prevalence of ICT, the concept of reading literacy has evolved to encompass both online reading and printed texts. This study clarifies the relationship between reading printed texts and online electronic texts from the perspective of individual differences in the inner and outer phases of ICT in a partial mediation model. We used the…

We explored the genetic background of individual differences in dynamic measures of verbal learning ability in children, using a Dutch version of the Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT). Nine-year-old twin pairs (N = 112 pairs) were recruited from the Netherlands Twin Register. When possible, an older sibling between 10 and 14 years old…