Postgraduate study is both challenging and demanding. Additionally, for teachers who study part time while employed full time, there are additional professional demands. So why would they enrol in postgraduate study? Utilising expectancy-value theory, the motivations of 27 experienced teachers for undertaking and completing a masters degree were…

Peer beliefs and attitudes play a prominent role in adolescent behaviors. Various curricula have been developed to teach students about sexual health from a skills-based perspective with successful, lasting effects. This study examined how adolescents' expectancies for success in and values held for a sexual health curriculum are related to their…

As the first impressions, introductory courses in college play an influential role in students' decision to persist in science majors. We use students' open-ended explanations to understand how students make persistence decisions at the end of their introductory courses, based on Eccles' Expectancy-Value (E-V) Theory. Participants (N = 2737; 45.6%…

This study aimed to better understand the relationships between U.S. high school students' STEM-related educational experiences, expectancy-value attitudes, achievement, course-taking, and college major choices. Analyses employed data from three waves of the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09) and used structural equation modeling to…

Toward the end of 6th grade, some bright and highly motivated science-oriented Israeli students and their parents are required to make a decision: whether or not to enrol in a non-mandatory advanced science programme for 7th graders ([almost equal to] 12 year olds) upon entering middle-school. In other words, for many students, entry into the STEM…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine teachers and school leaders' experiences using data in the state of Arkansas. Research Design: Initially, an exploratory pilot study was conducted to examine educators' experiences using data within one Arkansas district. This involved focus groups with 24 participants from 10 schools. Data were…

Logically, an unethical behavior performed yesterday should also be unethical if performed tomorrow. However, the present studies suggest that the timing of a transgression has a systematic effect on people's beliefs about its moral acceptability. Because people's emotional reactions tend to be more extreme for future events than for past events,…

The author wrote a piece called "What Our Children Should Learn about 9/11." In that piece, the author made just four simple points. These include: (1) children should know the facts; (2) once they had a grounding in the facts, the children should not abjure moral judgment; (3) children should learn to make both analytical and moral…

Purpose: This research seeks to explore the inevitable internal struggle experienced by school leaders when making ethically-informed judgments. The study acquired principals' intimate reflections about professional decision making in response to personal versus organizational and/or professional value discrepancy as identified in the ethic of the…

Individuals influence each others' decisions about cultural products such as songs, books, and movies; but to what extent can the perception of success become a "self-fulfilling prophecy"? We have explored this question experimentally by artificially inverting the true popularity of songs in an online "music market," in which 12,207 participants…

Reviews two experiments that strongly support dual coding theory. Dual coding theory holds that communicating concretely (tactile, auditory, or visual stimuli) affects evaluative thinking stronger than communicating abstractly through words and numbers. The experiments applied this theory to the realm of age and evaluation. (MJP)