The increased rates of deviations in sexual behavior among young people and the number of divorces among young married families provide evidence of the urgent relevance of valeological/health-promoting sex education for the young people of Russia. This article discusses scientific and practical experience from the implementation of program…

Purpose: This study asked if children's performance on language tests reflects different dimensions of language and if this dimensionality changes with development. Method: Children were given standardized language batteries at kindergarten and at second, fourth, and eighth grades. A revised modified parallel analysis was used to determine the…

Educationalists experience difficulties with the construction of competence maps that describe final attainment levels of educational programs. Web-based support was developed with three supportive aids: A construction kit, a phenomenarium, and an information bank. Each supportive aid was expected to improve perceived process and product quality…

In order to study the influence on memorization of external inputs as well as children's own strategies, we examined both parental discourses in terms of distancing (Sigel, 1970) and spontaneous rehearsal by children during a memory task. Our aim was to assess the influence of each factor for children between 3 and 5 years of age. In our study of…

The study examined the component structure of the Relational Health Indices (B. Liang et al., 2002) with a mixed-sex sample of students seeking services at a university counseling center. In contrast to previous findings, results suggested a unidimensional structure for the peer and mentor composites and a 2-component structure for the community…

Background: Reversal theory (Apter, 1982, 1989, ) is one of the motivational frameworks which attempts to examine human subjective experiences and behaviours. There are four dyads of metamotivational states (telic-paratelic, conformist-negativistic, autic-alloic, and mastery-sympathy) and individuals may prefer to be in one rather than the other…

The success of a country's education system depends to a large extent on the mutual trust and co-operation existing between all partners. However, numerous documented incidents in the media have confirmed that there is a field of tension between school governing bodies of public schools in South Africa and the Department of Education, which is of…

An instrument developed in the United States by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assess HIV/AIDS knowledge and four attitudinal dimensions (Peer Pressure, Abstinence, Drug Use, and Threat of HIV Infection) and an instrument developed by Basen-Engquist et al. (1999) to measure abstinence and condom use were translated,…

Objective: The authors developed and validated measures of college drinking expectations, psychosocial influences, and values. Participants: Freshmen at college entry (N = 320) and the end of freshman year (N = 420) participated. Methods: The College Drinking Influences Survey, administered in paper and Web-based versions, consists of 3 distinct…

Student dissatisfaction concerning education has been an issue for decades. A 1972 investigation into the thinking of youth found that respondents were neither satisfied nor confident regarding the situation they faced and were pessimistic about the future. The primary purpose of the study reported in this paper was to examine whether students in…

This paper reports on the first stage of the construction and refinement process underway in pursuit of developing a brief composite instrument to measure teachers' attitudes toward computers. Items (n=284) from 14 questionnaires assessing teacher attitudes toward computers were completed by 118 educators in Texas in 1995. Internal consistency…

In this article some results are presented relating to the dimensionality of instruments containing polytomously scored as well as dichotomously scored items, concentrating on the 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress' (NAEP) mathematics and reading assessment data and several simulated datasets. The maximum likelihood factor analytic…

This paper outlines procedures used to derive variables from data in the National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty; these variables were then used to create measures not expressly included as items in that survey. The derived variables were used to examine faculty satisfaction in two contexts: first, the complexity of satisfaction, and second, the…

This paper discusses the process through which a powerful multidimensional measure of affect and cognition in relation to adult learning of computing skills was derived from its early theoretical stages to its validation using structural equation modeling. The discussion emphasizes the importance of ensuring a strong substantive base from which to…

Sixty-three fifth-grade children completed daily activity diaries indicating how they spent their non-school time for 15 days. From these diaries, estimates of the minutes per day that were spent in various activities were derived. The estimate of book-reading time from the activity diary correlated with new measures of individual differences in…