The Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI; Weinstein et al., "Learning and study strategies inventory." H&H Publishing, 1987) is a prominent instrument used in thousands of institutions worldwide as an educational and research tool. Despite its widespread prevalence, there are inconsistencies regarding the underlying latent…

Personal relevance goes by many names in the motivation literature, stemming from a number of theoretical frameworks. Currently these lines of research are being conducted in parallel with little synthesis across them, perhaps because there is no unifying definition of the relevance construct within which this research can be situated. In this…

The overall purpose of this study was to investigate the role of personal relevance in conceptual change. First, we used an experimental design to investigate the role of augmented activation--which directly implicated teachers' personal prior beliefs about mathematics learning and instruction--and refutational text manipulations on short and…

In educational environments, monitoring persons' progress over time may help teachers to evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching procedures. Electronic learning environments are increasingly being used as part of formal education and resulting datasets can be used to understand and to improve the environment. This study presents…

The Teaching for Transformative Experiences in Science (TTES) model was designed to facilitate the application of academic learning in students' everyday experiences. In the current study, we describe a 2-year design-based intervention that aimed to further develop and evaluate the TTES model. In the first year, a teacher implemented the TTES…

The present studies aimed to reexamine college students' achievement goal orientations by situating their motivation in a cooperative learning context. The authors proposed and validated a scale of 3 levels of trichotomous achievement goal orientations. In Study 1, confirmatory factor analyses supported that, in laboratory cooperative learning…

This study was designed to forge stronger theoretical and empirical links between achievement goal theory and attribution theory. High school students ("N" = 224) completed a self-report survey that assessed 3 types of achievement goals, 7 types of attributions, and self-efficacy. Results indicated that students' adoption of achievement…

The aim of this study was to examine the role of motivational beliefs in mediating the relationship among perceived teacher support, learning strategy use, and student achievement. The author analyzed the Programme for International Student Assessment mathematics scores and questionnaire responses of 4,855 15-year-old students in Turkey via…

Effects of prior knowledge and elaborate processing on retention of connected discourse were studied. Using the mean scores of the control group from each condition, derived scores were calculated for experimental groups. Results indicate prior knowledge and elaborative processing operate to diminish retroactive interference generated by reading a…

A structural equation model of second language acquisition for adult learners describing the relationships between latent variables representing sociocultural background, cognitive ability, functional language proficiency, cognitive language proficiency, attitudes, motivation, and instructional approach was evaluated. Data were drawn from a…

Attempts to select empirically the optimal cutting score or criterion level for a test based on response data from validation samples of instructed and uninstructed students. This score maximizes the probability of correct mastery-nonmastery decisions (or minimizes the probability of incorrect decisions). (Author/RK)

Studied were the effects on observational concept learning of the experimenter as his own model, versus the experimenter plus a separate model, versus a nonmodeling (control) procedure, as well as the provision of favorable versus neutral outcome-expectation. (Authors/CB)

The latent composition of the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory for High School (LASSI-HS) was studied through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis of results from 367 ninth-grade students. Evidence supports a three-factor model. Interrelationships among the constructs are examined, and use of the instrument is discussed. (SLD)