Background: The literature on the determinants of academic motivation indicates that social and affective processes connected to students' interpersonal relationships are central elements in understanding students' academic motivation and other school-related outcomes. Aims: The aim of this study was to answer the following questions: Does…

Background: Sexual minority adolescents appear to be at increased risk for internalizing disorders relative to their heterosexual peers, but there is a paucity of research explaining this elevated risk. Emotion regulation deficits are increasingly understood as important predictors of internalizing psychopathology among general samples of…

Measures of teacher-student relationship quality (TSRQ), effortful engagement, and achievement in reading and math were collected once each year for 3 consecutive years, beginning when participants were in 1st grade, for a sample of 671 (53.1% male) academically at-risk children attending 1 of 3 school districts in Texas. In separate latent…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among students' self-perception, attitudes toward school, study and organizational skills, achievement motivation, attributional style, gender, parental involvement and style, parental income and parental level of education, and students' academic performance or achievement. Using…

This investigation examined the impact combinations of at-risk factors had on 10,373 high school students in an urban school district from the school years 2000-2001 to 2006-2007. Students were categorized as high school graduates or dropouts. At-risk factors were associated with each student record. Hypothetical structural models were created for…

The purpose of this study was to empirically examine college graduate, faculty, and human resource manager descriptions of needed, received, and further training in eight employability dimensions of literacy and numeracy, critical thinking, management, leadership, interpersonal, information technology, systems thinking skills, and work ethic…

The present study investigated how maternal HIV and mediating family processes are associated with adolescent distress, substance use, and risky sexual behavior. Mother-adolescent (ages 12-21) dyads (N = 264) were recruited from neighborhoods where the HIV-affected families resided (161 had mothers with HIV). Mediating family processes were youth…

This study uses an ecological systems framework to examine how indicators of individual, family, and school contexts are associated with post-secondary educational enrollment among a sample of rural youth. Structural equation modeling allows us to examine both direct and indirect effects of these contexts on school enrollment. Unique elements of…

Recent literature on the determinants of academic motivation has shown that parenting and emotions are central elements in understanding students' achievement goals. The authors of this study set out to examine the predictive relationship between parental behaviors during the last year of elementary school and adolescents' achievement goals at the…

The study examined associations between university teachers' experiences of academic leadership, their perceptions of a specific academic context and their approaches to teaching in a particular subject that was taught in that context. The sample consisted of 439 lecturers in Australian universities in four fields of study. Lecturers completed…

Recent research in statistical reasoning has focused on the developmental process in students when learning statistical reasoning skills. This study investigates statistical reasoning from the perspective of individual differences. As manifestation of heterogeneity, students' prior attitudes toward statistics, measured by the extended Survey of…

Latent class analysis (LCA) is a statistical method used to identify a set of discrete, mutually exclusive latent classes of individuals based on their responses to a set of observed categorical variables. In multiple-group LCA, both the measurement part and structural part of the model can vary across groups, and measurement invariance across…

The search for cut-off criteria of fit indices for model fit evaluation (e.g., Hu & Bentler, 1999) assumes that these fit indices are sensitive to model misspecification, but not to different types of models. If fit indices were sensitive to different types of models that are misspecified to the same degree, it would be very difficult to establish…

Few genetically-informative studies have attempted to explicitly identify the "shared environmental" (i.e., those environmental influences that contribute to sibling similarity) factors now known to contribute to adolescent delinquency. The current study therefore examined whether the parent-child relationship served as one source of these shared…

Two studies investigated the degree to which the relationship between rapid automatized naming (RAN) performance and reading development is driven by shared phonological processes. Study 1 assessed RAN, phonological awareness, and reading performance in 1010 7- to 10-year-olds. Results showed that RAN deficits occurred in the absence of…