Individuals hold different epistemic beliefs at different ages, and these beliefs can affect a wide range of reasoning tasks. The present study examined Chinese secondary school students' epistemic beliefs at different grade levels, and how these related to the students' abilities to identify various forms of fallacy with the use of a…

Despite an increased awareness of language learner performance in task-based instruction, little is known about how learners perceive and respond to different task factors. This study investigates the effects of task complexity and modality on (a) learners' perception of task difficulty, skill, and its balance, and on (b) learners' task…

This study investigated the comparative effects of strategic and unpressured within-task planning on second language (L2) Chinese oral production and the role of working memory in mediating the effects of the two types of planning. Twenty-nine L2 Chinese learners at a large New Zealand university performed a narrative task after watching a…

Adolescence is characterized by increasing incidence of health risk behaviors, including experimentation with drugs and alcohol. To fill the gap in our understanding of the associations between risky decision-making and health risk behaviors, we investigated associations between laboratory-based risky decision-making using the Stoplight task and…

This study investigates students' perceptions of classroom assessment tasks as a function of gender, subject area, and grade level. Data from 2753 students on Dorman and Knightley's (2006) Perceptions of Assessment Tasks Inventory (PATI) were analyzed in a MANOVA design. Results showed that students tended to hold positive perceptions of their…

The purpose of this study was to survey a sample of high school students in Hawaii and Singapore about what they perceive to be helpful aspects of classroom environments in their learning of science and humanities subjects. The What Is Happening In this Class? (WIHIC) questionnaire was administered in the fall of 2003 to 73 high school students in…

Studies comparing virtual and physical manipulative environments (VME and PME) in inquiry-based science learning have mostly focused on students' learning outcomes but not on the actual processes they engage in during the learning activities. In this paper, we examined experimentation strategies in an inquiry activity and their relation to…

Background: The aim of the study was to investigate prospective associations between dietary patterns and cognitive performance during adolescence. Methods: Participants were sourced from the Western Australian Pregnancy Cohort (Raine) Study that includes 2868 children born between 1989 and 1992 in Perth, Western Australia. When the children were…

Metacognition refers to students' knowledge and regulation of cognition, as well as their accuracy in predicting their academic performance. This study addressed two major questions: 1) how do metacognitive knowledge, regulation and accuracy differ across domains?, and 2) how do students' individual differences relate to their reported…

This is a pilot study of a proposed model for examining the main and interactionist effects of achievement goal orientations on moral function and the role of perceived ability as a potential moderator in sport morality levels through cluster analysis procedures. One hundred and three elite (103) athletes participating in Division I wrestling…

With 97 learners in an advanced Spanish course, the study examines the effects of textual enhancement adjuncts, prior subject knowledge, first language (L1) reading ability, and second language (L2) Spanish proficiency on L2 comprehension of scientific passages. Readings included two texts with two types of embedded questions: a pause or written…

Background: The study deepened our understanding of how students' self-ef?cacy beliefs contribute to the context of teaching English as a foreign language in the framework of cognitive mediational paradigm at a ?ne-tuned task-speci?c level. Aim: The aim was to examine the relationship among task complexity, self-ef?cacy beliefs, domain-related…

VALEURTECH is a pilot project under the European Commission's Leonardo II programme. It includes 35 partners from higher education institutions and professional organizations in eight European countries and has the major objectives: of (a) setting up a homogeneous "labelling" process, such as a diploma supplement, based on a common…

Establishing stability, defined as observing minimal measurement error in a test-retest assessment, is vital to validating psychometric tools. Correlational methods, such as Pearson product-moment, intraclass, and kappa are tests of association or consistency, whereas stability or reproducibility (regarded here as synonymous) assesses the…

Surveys 101 wind instrumentalists to reveal major differences in the pattern of influences leading to the re-creative skill of performing a repertoire of rehearsed music for a formal examination compared to the creative ability of improvising. Uses a path analysis to determine links between the data and theoretical model. (MJP)