Locus of control is a construct that reflects an individual's perception of control over his or her own destiny. The thesis is that people adopt either an internal or an external orientation. Internally oriented persons consider success the result of ability and effort. Externally oriented individuals attribute success to luck, fate, or powerful…

The relationships between parent and child verbal interaction and academic achievement were examined for at-risk adolescent Black males. The Verbal Interaction Questionnaire was used to measure student's perceptions of parental communication, and scores from the Stanford Achievement Test battery and school grades measured academic achievement.…

A study was conducted to explore whether the methods employed by the Cooperative Extension Service in its dissemination of practical skills and knowledge are of help to today's families. In order to examine these factors, two leadership programs for women sponsored by the Cooperative Extension Service in Alaska were studied. One group, the…

The usual ways of thinking about organiztions represent them as physical or biological entities that respond to their environments as whole, integrated systems existing apart from individuals. Such images omit human will, imagination and moral choice. If we think about organizations in human terms, we must think about the capacity of individuals…

The self-serving effect (SSE), often depicted as a bias, is the tendency to accept responsibility for one's own successes but not one's own failures. Two studies of Australian fifth graders (n=226, n=559) were further analyzed to investigate individual differences in SSE. The Sydney Attribution Scale measured students' perceptions of the causes of…

A study was conducted of 55 preschool children attending Title XX day care centers in Amarillo, Texas, to investigate the cognitive, language, fine motor, and socioemotional development of the children. Results indicated that the students were below the 50th percentile for their age group norms on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test Revised, the…

The relationship among key social/psychological variables (self-esteem, locus of control, social isolation, perceptions of role models) and achievement among migrant children was examined, using December 1980 data obtained from 1,004 seventh grade students (515 males/489 females) from a large school district in Hidalgo County in the Texas Lower…

The behavioral implications of teachers' career alienation, defined as feelings of disappointment with career and professional development, were explored with a sample of 1,869 elementary and secondary school teachers in Ontario, Canada. Analyses included bivariate correlations, T-tests, and multiple regressions. The 39 independent variables were…

Four general problems (two substantive, two methodological) were addressed in a research project: (1) Does the nature of the pupil or the setting make a difference in the teaching style which is most effective? (2) Does the cognitive level of the learning objective make a difference? (3) How can relationships within the classroom be analyzed? and…

The impact of the administrative climate, individualized instruction, and counseling to develop student internal control, was measured in this 1975 study against vocational program completion rates, individual locus of control expectancy, and academic outcomes of high risk students in developmental programs. All entering vocational students and a…

The development and implementation of a counseling model designed to improve retention and academic success of high risk students at Ball State University, Indiana, are described. Initially, academic advisors were trained through workshops conducted by team members to translate information on individual advisee learning styles, behavior…

A study was conducted of Indiana's Summer Programs for the Education and Development of Youth (SPEDY) to describe the program themselves and to study the programs' effect on participants' short-term career education attitudes, knowledge, and skills. SPEDY is a training for public-sector work program operated each summer for about ten weeks for…

The effects of the fifth grade unit of the School Health Curriculum Project (SHCP) were investigated in a multicultural setting in Albuquerque, New Mexico. One of the purposes of the study was to design and test portions of an evaluation model that could be expanded and used by other school districts which are involved with SHCP. The second paper…

Two versions of a computer-assisted instruction practice lesson on series resonant circuit analysis were compared. One was a program control version which required considerable time for students to reach criterion level. The other program was a revised student control version of the same lesson. In the program control version, quantity of practice…

At-risk students are defined as those who are in danger of not graduating from school. These potential dropouts can be characterized by a variety of factors that lead to educational underachievement. In this study, the outcome explored is "outcast," a combination of student behavioral factors that captures student alienation from school…