School is sometimes framed as a place for preparing, a place for becoming college and career ready. At times this approach positions school as an important space "within" the world of college and careers, envisioned perhaps as Dewey imagined it, as a safe place to try things, a space where real work of participation in society could be done but in…

Controls from within, more commonly referred to as self-control, are fundamental skills that children and youth need to display every day in innumerable interactions in order to function well in society. The children and youth who get referred to child and youth care (CYC) programs usually lack adequate self-control skills, creating difficulty for…

Stratification is a central issue in family research, yet relatively few studies highlight its impact on family processes. Drawing on in-depth interviews (N = 137) and observational data (N = 12), we extend Melvin Kohn's research on childrearing values by examining how parental commitments to self-direction and conformity are enacted in daily…

In this study, we assessed the feasibility of a specific elaboration of the efficacy construct, distinguishing between personal and contextual aspects, as a criterion for comparing learning environments. The participants were 163 students from two student-regulated and two teacher-regulated programs in higher education. We measured students'…

One study with two distinct sections was conducted to identify factors facilitating escape from homelessness. In Section 1, 58 homeless individuals rated possible facilitators of escape (factors they believed would help them become more independent and self-sufficient). In Section 2, 80 participants who had already exited homelessness rated the…

This study examines the hypothesis that effective parental influence stems from the qualities of the parent-adolescent relationship rather than from explicit efforts to alter adolescents' behaviors. Adolescents' versus parents' perceptions of parental influence as predictors of parent-adolescent relationship quality and of adolescents' social…

The "paradox of indoctrination" has proven to be a persistent problem in discussions of the cultivation of autonomy through education. In short, if indoctrination means instilling beliefs without reasons, and if children lack the rational capacity to evaluate reasons, how can that capacity be cultivated without indoctrination? Some educational…

Behavioral decision research offers a general approach to studying cognitive aspects of decision making, as well as a platform for studying their interplay with social and affective processes. Applied to any decision, behavioral decision research involves three interrelated tasks: (a) "normative" analysis, identifying the expected impacts of…

This article presents an analysis of higher education students' retrospective meaning making of their experiences of personal development planning (PDP). An earlier study of first year students had indicated that students rarely reflected on their own meta-cognitive processes and were preoccupied with practical study skill matters, particularly…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which project preferences and social capital constrain mobility in project-based careers. Design/methodology/approach: The paper analyzes the careers of 352 individuals who entered the motion picture industry between 1988 and 1990. It uses motion picture credit histories to generate…

The purpose of this paper is to report on a study that provided an opportunity to consider Transactional Distance Theory (TDT) in a current technology context of web-based learning in distance education (DE), high-school classrooms. Data collection relied on semi-structured interviews conducted with 22 e-teachers and managers in Newfoundland and…

The complexity in today's operational military environment and the responsibility of leadership in this environment has exponentially increased over the past century. This trend will continue as global economies, political structures, and technologies continue to evolve. Learner autonomy is recognized as a paramount concern in leadership programs,…

Griffiths and Tenenbaum (2006) asked individuals to make predictions about the duration or extent of everyday events (e.g., cake baking times), and reported that predictions were optimal, employing Bayesian inference based on veridical prior distributions. Although the predictions conformed strikingly to statistics of the world, they reflect…

The college classroom is both an intimate and an alien environment. Most professors have an intimate knowledge of what they do in their own classrooms while possessing very little knowledge of what other professors, even at their own institution, do in their classrooms. Each year, faculty in political science departments construct their courses…

Anarchist theory has a long-standing history in political theory, sociology, and philosophy. As a radical discourse, anarchist theory pushes educators and researchers towards new conceptualizations of community, theory, and praxis. Early writers, like Joseph Proudhoun and Emma Goldman, to more contemporary anarchists, such as Noam Chomsky, have…