Because intermediate grade students were not working up to their potential, a coordinator of elementary school instruction implemented a practicum to increase students' motivation. In-service meetings were held with six intermediate grade teachers from each of two schools for the purpose of planning techniques and devising activities for…

To measure perceived control in one's communication environment, a study examined the world views of the respondents as reported in a 28-item questionnaire. Subjects, 1,927 men and women composed of students and university personnel, military personnel, executives and managers, high school students and teachers, and members of women's groups, were…

The effectiveness of two alternative attitude change strategies--a traditional persuasive strategy and a combined attributional/persuasive strategy--in altering attitudes toward nuclear disarmament were compared. Seventeen male and 39 female undergraduate students at a small university participated. A nuclear disarmament attitude pretest was…

Written by scholars interested in practical questions, the four articles in this review of research on current topics in child development and early education focus on children's social and emotional development and the impact of various settings and interventions on that development. The first article explores the issue of how compensatory…

Several studies have shown that teachers' locus of control orientations are differentially related to attitudes about teaching and classroom behavior. To investigate the relationship between teachers' locus of control and students' perceptions of classroom climate, academic responsibility, and grades, matched pairs of teachers from grades four…

Discusses attribution theory and its effect on teachers' attitudes toward students and describes a study of 155 elementary teachers in Costa Rica that investigated the consequences of the teachers attributing student performance to low ability and to insufficient effort. Cultural values that may affect the outcomes are also discussed. (28…

Uses a synthetic family strategy to demonstrate the operation of caregiving transactions with children judged either "difficult" or "easy." A total of 96 elementay-age boys were paired with unrelated mothers for videotaped interactions. Results focused on socially competent child behavior patterns. (CI)

This part of the Papua New Guinea new secondary teachers study aimed at finding out more about why teacher trainees at Goroka Teachers College chose teaching as a career. One of the important factors about whether students stay in teaching for a short or a long time is the way that their choices of school are dealt with administratively. Students…

Discusses four instruments that can be incorporated into an entry-level testing program to assess cognitive style, anxiety toward learning, locus of control, and conceptual level. Examines the usefulness of measuring these attributes in helping community college instructors develop individualized learning approaches for nontraditional students.…

Describes a study of undergraduate students that examined the relationship between selection of college computer courses and self-perceived proficiency in using computers, computer causal attributions, and selected computer attitudes. Gender issues are addressed, correlations between variables are examined, and implications for educators are…

The responses of 194 fifth graders to a questionnaire assessing causal attributions, academic expectancies, and self-evaluation of smartness varied as a function of whether the questionnaire was administered individually or in a group. Children expressed lower and less accurate predictions in the individual condition than in the group condition.…

Examined ethnic similarities and differences in children's perceptions of their parents' educational socialization practices and attributions for success and failure, and the impact of these variables on mathematics achievement in a sample of 591 poor fifth and sixth graders. Discusses findings of ethnic differences in terms of the culture and…

This study examines the contribution of children's linguistic ability and mothers' use of mental-state language to young children's understanding of false belief and their subsequent ability to make belief-based emotion attributions. In Experiment 1, children (N = 51) were given three belief-based emotion-attribution tasks. A standard task in…

This study, part of the National Study of Student Learning, sought to determine the extent to which college students' development of internal locus of attribution for academic success during the first year of college was influenced by institutional characteristics, students' academic experiences, and their social/non-academic experiences. The…

The purpose of this study was to determine if students' gender was related to their own and their perceived parental motivational orientations in school achievement. Motivational orientations in school achievement were measured by a number of items focusing on the meaning of success in school, preference for school feedback, school task…