This study compared the motivational orientations and metacognitive abilities of 143 Grade 7 intellectually gifted students in an Australian selective school with 133 average-achieving age peers attending comprehensive schools. Gifted students had greater confidence in their own control over successes or failures in school tasks, demonstrated more…

Two experiments were performed to examine the process of attributional thinking in Black and White children who differed in social class. Blacks did not display a less adaptive attributional pattern than did whites following actual performance on exams, and no differences existed in children's understanding of the meaning of causes. (Author/LMO)

Individuals who are stigmatized are people for whom others hold negative beliefs. In these three 1989 studies members of a stigmatized group were 7th- and 8th-grade adolescents, aged 14 and 15 years old, from a large urban midwestern African-American population. In the first study the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale was administered to…

Descriptive data were collected from male and female students in grades 7, 9, and 11 on five learner attributes commonly reported as influencing student learning and/or motivation: desire for approval of others, attribution of success or failure, desire for challenge in academic settings, perceived self-competence in school settings, and locus of…