Authors examined self-efficacy to motivate abstinent behavior (among youth) in a sample of instructors teaching abstinence-only-until-marriage education in Texas (N = 104). Sixty-one percent of the sample had been trained/certified to teach abstinence education. Instructors (mostly female and White) were more confident motivating students to…

This panel study investigated the directionality of relations between adolescents' perceptions of their parents' psychological control and adolescents' self-reported internalizing and aggressive (physical and relational) behaviors. Data were collected from a random, community sample of 530 adolescents ages 12-19 years old at time 1, and again 2…

Key psychosocial risks associated with adolescent smoking are well established. However, the ways in which the key risks of impulsivity, peer cigarette smoking, and self-reported use of alcohol interact to predict adolescent cigarette smoking is largely unknown. A sample of 210 Australian middle high school students aged 14-16 completed…

Although improvement of clients' state is a central concern for psychotherapy, relatively little is known about how change in outcome variables unfolds during psychotherapy. Client progress may follow highly variable temporal courses, and this variation in treatment courses may have important clinical implications. By analyzing treatment progress…

The extent to which managers could accurately predict what items/activities their employees report as preferred was examined. First, managers were asked to rank order a list of items/activities they thought their employees would most prefer to be incorporated into a performance improvement plan. Next, employee preference for these same items was…

Suicide is a leading cause of death that is difficult to predict because clinical assessment has relied almost exclusively on individuals' self-report of suicidal thoughts. This is problematic because there often is motivation to conceal such thoughts. The authors tested the ability of the Self-Injury Implicit Association Test (SI-IAT), a…

The purpose of this study was to examine the reliability, validity, and predictive utility of 3 measures for screening kindergarten students for risk for math difficulty (MD). The screening measures assessed number sense and computational fluency, constructs central to typical early mathematical development. Conceptual and operational outcomes…

This study highlights the computer-mediated discursive activity of two dyads of first year educational sciences students, each collaboratively exploring several options for increasing the equilibrium size of a fish population in a lake. Our focus is on peers' attempts to come up with justified predictions about the adequacy of several options for…

This study investigates how community characteristics, student background, school climate, and zero-tolerance policies interact to affect school crime. The study articulates and fits a school crime model to 712 high schools participating in the 2000 School Survey on Crime and Safety, confirming that school location and student socioeconomic status…

In this study, the prediction power of the item characteristics based on the experts' predictions on conditions try-out practices cannot be applied was examined for item characteristics computed depending on classical test theory and two-parameters logistic model of latent trait theory. The study was carried out on 9914 randomly selected students…

The present paper reports the design process and the experimentation of a teaching-learning sequence about the concept of mechanical wave propagation and the role played by media where waves are propagating. The sequence focuses on the central issue of the relationships between observable phenomena, like macroscopic behaviours of waves, and their…

African American children are overrepresented in foster care by more than twice their proportion in the population (U.S. Government Accountability Office [USGAO], 2007). Building upon research relating faith (religiosity) to positive health and mental health, this study utilized cognitive and religious coping theories to examine the influence of…

This descriptive-correlational study predicted performance of beginning agricultural education teachers on principles of learning and teaching (PLT) and Agriculture content (AgC) tests of the PRAXIS II examination using demographic and academic variables. Performance on the PRAXIS II was used for issuing initial teaching licenses to the…

This study examines word decision strategies that 40 U.S. college beginning and advanced learners of Chinese applied during reading. It first compares similarities and differences between the two groups in choosing strategies when making word decisions, then identifies effective word decision strategies from more than a hundred strategies used by…

The purpose of this study was to examine oral reading fluency (ORF) in the context of a large-scale federal reading initiative conducted in low performing, high poverty schools. The objectives were to (a) investigate the relation between ORF and comprehensive reading tests, (b) examine whether slope of performance over time on ORF predicted…