Examines procrastination by college students (30 women, 7 men) of academic and nonacademic tasks at beginning and end of semester. Analysis found that procrastinated tasks early in the term were more effortful and anxiety provoking than other tasks during the term. Results imply that academic and nonacademic tasks should be challenging, yet fun,…

The Scholastic Assessment Tests (SAT) measures students' general learned abilities, but student test performance is influenced as much by family environment as it is by formal education. Many colleges use SAT scores in admissions decisions. Students would be far better served if there was a concentration on other ways of predicting success in…

Compares the effects of specific and general abilities on the reading and mathematics achievement of students from three ethnic groups. Results suggest that specific abilities are important for understanding student achievements, and that the same abilities are important for all ethnic groups. (Author/MKA)

Spearman's ''Law of Diminishing Returns'' with regard to ability is tested in a dataset from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth. The dataset consisted of a sample of 6980 children aged 12-16 from the 1997 cohort. The subjects were tested with a computer administrated adaptive format of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery…

This study concerns the contingent nature of the relationships of student-teacher style match (or mismatch) to students' academic achievement. Participants were 135 (59 male and 76 female) students (average age of 21.5 years) from three academic disciplines (mathematics, physics, and public administration) who responded to the Thinking Styles…

Three different methods were used to investigate the basis of judgments about the success of inclusion made by key staff in an education service in the UK. First, a structured questionnaire was used by staff to rate the pupil social and learning skills needed for success in mainstream classes. Second, an open-ended elicitation technique was used…

Although significant federal funds are tied to student assessment, public education in this country is the responsibility of individual states. Subsequently, it seems as if there are as many approaches to measuring student ability and achievement as there are states. We now live in an increasingly mobile society in which today's families move from…

For many years students have participated in field trips venturing to museums, zoos, historical sites, and various other destinations. Despite the consistencies of this trend, very few studies have been conducted that investigate the type of long-term impact these experiences have on students. In this study. eight adults, four men and four women,…

This study examined an approach for assessing and intervening with academic concerns that is conceptually derived from the distinction between skill deficits and performance deficits. A class-wide assessment was used to describe the students' functioning in the context of their peers and to help select a target concern for intervention. An…

This analysis of gender performance differences in a first-level New Zealand university course in computer science is predicated on the model of academic ability proposed by Charles Spearman, the eminent educational psychologist and statistician. The regression model is based on the theoretical constructs of general academic ability and specific…

Responds to comments made by Dai (see record 2004-14303-011) and Plucker et al (200414303-012) on the current authors' original article (see record 2003-06802-005) on the big-fish--little-pond effect (BFLPE). In its simplest form the BFLPE predicts that equally able students have lower academic self-concepts when attending schools where the…

This case study describes the development and field-testing of a research-based scoring rubric for analyzing elementary students' schoolyard habitat drawings. To justify schoolyard learning experiences in U.S. schools, teachers, program evaluators, and others need valid, reliable, and objective assessment tools for determining if, and how, these…

Never has it been more important to nurture and support students pursuing a nursing education. Nursing shortage in the U.S. is a well-documented problem that is worsened by demographic factors such as the aging nursing workforce, the aging of the general population, and a declining number of young people in the workforce. The nursing profession…

The primary purpose of the study was to determine if a treatment that concentrates on building programs from previously written modules can improve the decomposition processes of novice programmers in the C++ programming language and, hence, programming performance. For purposes of performance analysis, a subsample of 23 students was divided into…

The objectives of this study are: (a) Evaluate science major freshman students' ability to differentiate between heat energy and temperature, after having studied the topic of thermochemistry; (b) ascertain the degree to which students resist change from the caloric to the kinetic-molecular theory; (c) study the ability to differentiate between…