This study examined a psychosocial mechanism of how general self-efficacy interacts with other key factors and influences degree aspiration for students enrolled in an urban diverse community college. Using general self-efficacy scales, the authors hypothesized the General Self-efficacy model for Community College students (the GSE-CC model). A…

This study examined how personal, behavioral and environmental factors influenced educational outcomes of Black collegians at predominately white institutions in the south. Specifically, 11 institutions are represented in this study from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. The purpose of this study…

Affective factors such as the achievement emotions are considered critical for students' academic performance in STEM degree programmes and careers. In this study, a reciprocal causation model was tested between two affective factors: enjoyment and anxiety, and organic chemistry course performance. Each variable was measured three times in four…

This study examined the effects of pubertal status, pubertal timing (actual and perceived), and youth biological sex on symptom dimensions of anxiety (i.e., social, separation, harm avoidance, physical) in African Americans (n = 252; ages 8-12). For girls, results indicated that pubertal status and timing (actual) exerted similar effects for some…

Cognitive-behavioral interventions (CBIs) are effective in decreasing externalizing behavior in school-aged children. To ensure that CBIs meet the needs of a diverse student population, it is important to examine whether intervention effectiveness is influenced by characteristics common to students identified with problem behaviors. In this study,…

This study examined the predictive validity of formative assessments embedded in a Tier 2 intervention curriculum for kindergarten students identified as at risk for reading difficulty. We examined when (i.e., months during the school year) measures could predict reading outcomes gathered at the end of kindergarten and whether the predictive…

The primary objective of this cross-cultural investigation is to compare patterns in student responses to an empirically scrutinized character education measure administered to students in four school districts in Florida with students in a school in Kenya. In this way, the generalizability of findings for scale scores could be compared across…

This study confirmed appropriate measurement model fit for a theoretical model, the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) vocational choice (STEM-VC) model. This model identified factors that successfully predicted a student's vocational choice decision to pursue a STEM degree for Latina/o and White community college students.…

Research indicates the primary difference between strong and weak readers is their phonemic awareness skills. However, there is no consensus regarding which specific components of phonemic awareness contribute most robustly to reading comprehension. In this study, the relationship among sound blending, sound segmentation, and reading comprehension…

In an effort to understand cognitive foundations of oral language comprehension (i.e., listening comprehension), we examined how inhibitory control, theory of mind, and comprehension monitoring are uniquely related to listening comprehension over and above vocabulary and age. A total of 156 children in kindergarten and first grade from…

A fairly recent definition of reading disability (RD) is that in the form of a hybrid model. The model views RD as a latent construct that is manifested through various observable unexpected impairments in reading-related skills and through inadequate response to intervention. The current report evaluated this new conceptualization of RD from an…

Background: The prevalence of obesity among high school students has risen in recent decades. Many high school students report trying to lose weight and some engage in disordered eating to do so. The obesity proneness model suggests that parents may influence their offspring's development of disordered eating. This study examined the viability of…

In an effort to understand cognitive foundations of oral language comprehension (i.e., listening comprehension), we examined how inhibitory control, theory of mind, and comprehension monitoring are uniquely related to listening comprehension over and above vocabulary and age. A total of 156 children in kindergarten and first grade from…

This study confirmed appropriate measurement model fit for a theoretical model, the STEM vocational choice (STEM-VC) model. This model identifies exogenous factors that successfully predicted, at a statistically significant level, a student's vocational choice decision to pursue a STEM degree at transfer. The student population examined for this…

In the present study we investigated a developmentally changing role of text reading fluency in mediating the relations of word reading fluency and listening comprehension to reading comprehension. We addressed this question by using longitudinal data from Grades 1 to 4 and employing structural equation models. Results showed that the role of text…