Evaluated distance students' ratings of the importance of strategies to facilitate self-directed learning in the National Open University, Taiwan. Topics include content validity; differences between current and inactive students, including motivation; institutional support services; orientation programs; instructional styles; course design; and…

Common factors contributing to teachers' resistance include risk aversion, craft expertise, and autonomy and isolation. Leaders' problem is to create ownership, not buy-in. Principals cannot make change alone or by edict, but must nurture engagement and commitment and motivate groups to learn and solve problems cooperatively. (MLH)

Discusses the need to motivate students to make information literacy programs successful and demonstrates how a middle school library media specialist used Small and Arnone's Motivation Overlay for Information Skills Instruction to build a set of customized toolkits to improve student research that includes the Big6[TM] approach to library and…

Discusses the benefits of students participating in art classes, focusing on the development of students. Explains that art education: (1) fosters a joy of learning; (2) supports intellectual, emotional, and social growth; (3) prepares leaders of the future; and (4) inspires students. (SM)

A survey of 43 Scottish open university students, aged 28-87, who were studying another language, examined extent of bilingualism; schooling in and exposure to other languages in youth; school, family, media, and travel influences on language attitudes; and motivations for language study. Social and educational legacies affecting student…

Surveys completed by 147 rural Missouri secondary science teachers indicated that only 70 percent were certified in their teaching area, lectures were the dominant teaching strategy, student interest in science was low, the use of inquiry in teaching was low, laboratory facilities and funding for supplies were inadequate, and teaching materials…

Demonstrates that Advanced Placement (AP) courses may not be appropriate for every student. Discusses the process of selecting students for AP U.S. history. Criteria include an application, summer sessions, and evidence of motivation to excel in the program. Considers the effects of this policy. (CMK)

A lack of gender-sensitive computer games exacerbates female disinterest in technology. Girls-only focus groups revealed phenomena that may help software developers awaken girls' enthusiasm for computing. For instance, girls placed a premium on richly textured video and audio, on collaborating rather than competing, on interacting with male…

Examines problems surrounding traditional assessment and evaluation in education and suggests ways to broaden the methodology as well as the validity of the assessment process. A study of elementary school students is described that used computer-generated assessment involving graphic feedback with and without text to study motivation and…

Describes a study that examined novice online searchers in an academic library as they used a full-text magazine article database on DIALOG. Purposes and motivations for using the database are discussed; affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor search behaviors are examined; and satisfaction with the results are considered. (LRW)

Overload and fragmentation combine to reduce educators' motivation for working on reform. Since educational change is essentially nonlinear, existing school cultures and structures are antithetically opposed to systemic reform activities, including networking. The lesson of systemic reform is to adopt strategies that mobilize large numbers of…

Examined how and why African American students remain and persist at white institutions, focusing on successful students. Results with 86 students confirmed earlier studies that recognized the influence of intrapsychic factors such as aspiration and motivation and interpsychic factors such as faculty relations and sociocultural environment. (SLD)

Children's ideas strongly shape classroom life in Japanese elementary schools. Japanese children identify goals for self-improvement, work hard to achieve them, and then choose new goals. Events like the Yotsubashi Festival are not diversions from the curriculum, but designed to help children develop socially, emotionally, ethically, and…

Examines the myth of motivational differences in black and white children's success in achievement tasks. Task performance outcomes from 145 children show that when tasks were systematically controlled across age, sex, and race substrata for interest value, racial differences in motivation disappeared. Implications for motivational theory and…

The Social Awareness Inventory (SAI), which assesses individual differences in eight social-perceptual styles, is introduced and applied in three studies. The model is derived by crossing the three binary dimensions of target (self or other), perspective (own or other's), and content (overt appearance or covert experience). The SAI appears to…