Interactive tasks designed to elicit real-life problem-solving behavior are rapidly becoming more widely used in educational assessment. Incorrect responses to such tasks can occur for a variety of different reasons such as low proficiency levels, low metacognitive strategies, or motivational issues. We demonstrate how behavioral patterns…

Routines play a major role in educational change in schools. But what happens if the routines performed by school staff fail to deal successfully with current challenges? What strategies aid adaptation of the routines in a specific situation? Up to now, there exists no comprehensive concept for understanding why and at what points the adapting of…

Psychological research has revealed that there is a strong tendency for people to believe that they have a 'true self', and to believe that this true self is inherently morally good. This would seemingly be very good news for virtue theorists, since this may help to promote virtue development. While there are some obvious benefits to people having…

In this explorative study, we investigate how sequences of behaviour are related to success or failure in complex problem-solving (CPS). To this end, we analysed log data from two different tasks of the problem-solving assessment of the Programme for International Student Assessment 2012 study (n = 30,098 students). We first coded every…

Early childhood practitioners frequently attempt to identify the cause of outcomes experienced by their learners. This is sometimes referred to as causal attribution. Causal attribution may be affected by prior success and failure of a learner, the amount of effort exerted by the learner, the ability level of the learner, and knowledge of any…

Some people ascribe successful language learning to an innate aptitude that cannot be further developed, at least after a certain young age (i.e., an entity mindset), while other people believe that language learning ability can be improved (i.e., an incremental mindset). The purpose of this research is to (a) introduce the Language Mindsets…

The authors conducted a grounded theory study of academic procrastination to explore adaptive and maladaptive aspects of procrastination and to help guide future empirical research. They discuss previous research on the definition and dimensionality of procrastination and describe the study in which interview data were collected in 4 stages,…

Development of a shame-based identity, also known as "toxic shame," can significantly interfere with an adult's ability to form an intimate relationship with another. As adults find peace from their past using transactional analysis and mental imagery, they learn to empower themselves to form healthy, intimate relationships.

The present study developed and examined a conceptual model of working through self-defeating patterns. Participants were 390 college students at a large midwestern university. Results indicated that self-defeating patterns mediated the relations between attachment and distress. Also, self-esteem mediated the link between self-defeating patterns…

Despite current attention given to the influence of star athletes' biorhythms, the author's studies lead him to the conclusion that biorhythms do not mediate behavior in sport. (Editor)

A model of achievement behavior incorporates the findings that attributions to ability and task were associated with high expectancies following success and low expectancies following failure, and that attributions to effort and luck were associated with low expectancies following success and high expectancies following failure. (Author/KM)

Two studies investigated treatments on the attribution and behavioral persistence of special education students (9 to 15 years old) labelled as helpless in arithmetic. In the first study (N=14), an attribution retraining treatment was effective in alleviating helplessness but not significantly more effective than a control treatment. In the second…

Results indicated that both male and female smokers perceived themselves as failing to meet the expectations of their parents and school. On the other hand, nonsmokers perceived themselves as more nearly meeting these expectations. (Author)

Discusses individuals as producers of their life span developments, and examines individuals' selection of their life paths and their proneness to failure. Considers a model that explains individuals' optimization of their life course management in terms of selection of life paths and compensation for age-related losses such that potential for…

In order to discover the effects of success and failure on subsequent aggressiveness, 26 male and 55 female college students were randomly assigned to success, failure, and neutral conditions. Those in the success condition were led to feel they were superior to other college students on a task, those in the failure condition were led to feel they…