Stressful life events are an important risk factor for psychopathology among children and adolescents. However, variation in life stress may be both stable and time-varying with associated differences in the antecedents. We tested, using latent variable modeling, a state-trait model of stressful life events in adolescence, and predictors of…

There is a limited literature on academic failure in higher education despite the fact that failure is a common experience among undergraduates. Student and course characteristics were examined in relation to proportions of fail grades assigned in a Faculty of Arts. Concerns had been expressed that combinations of two grades, F (failure to reach a…

Teacher-child relationships were examined as predictors of cortisol change in preschool children. Saliva for assays was collected from one hundred and ninety-one 4-year-olds (101 boys) in the mornings and afternoons on 2 days at child care, and before and after a series of challenging tasks and a teacher-child interaction session outside the…

This paper characterizes and evaluates the student allocation in the Portuguese public higher education system. It describes the supply and demand sides of the system by looking at the "numerus clausus" across areas of study and institutions, institutions' degree of diversity, and performance and adjustment indicators based on students'…

What constitutes quality in early childhood settings, and how can it best be measured with today's widely used tools and promising new approaches? Find authoritative answers in this book, a must-have for high-level administrators and policymakers as more and more states adopt early childhood Quality Rating and Improvement Systems. The most…

Controlled Drawing Observation (CDO) was developed by Tove Krogh and it has been used in Denmark, Finland and Estonia for assessing a child's readiness for school. CDO is a group test, it gives information about a child's functioning in an educational setting and it serves as a starting point for later individual assessment. The goal of the study…

This study assesses reading processes and/or strategies needed to deploy deep processing that could push learners towards syntactic-based constructions in L2 classrooms. Research has found L2 acquisition to present varying degrees of success and/or fossilization (Bley-Vroman 1989, Birdsong 1992 and Sharwood Smith 1994). For example, learners have…

Four studies present the validation of a self-report scale capturing "academic entitlement," which is defined as the tendency to possess an expectation of academic success without a sense of personal responsibility for achieving that success. The Academic Entitlement scale possesses a 2-factor structure (Study 1); 10 items measure students'…

Although cultural stereotypes of Asian students as being prone to rote learning, passive and teacher-dependent have been under criticism, the issue of the extent to which Asian heritage culture impacts on Asian students' learning attitudes and behaviour warrants further investigation. This paper reports on an empirical study which compares…

As the relative level of public support for higher education declines, colleges and universities aim to maximize alumni-giving to keep their programs competitive. Anchored in a utility maximization framework, this study employs the classification and regression tree methodology to examine characteristics of alumni donors and non-donors at a…

Although students have been taking the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) Science test for a few years, the State included the performance on the Science test in the school grade calculations for the first time in 2006-07. Although no official guidelines exist presently, the Science scores may also be incorporated in the NCLB Adequately…

Although structural equation modeling (SEM) is one of the most comprehensive and flexible approaches to data analysis currently available, it is nonetheless prone to researcher misuse and misconceptions. This article offers a brief overview of the unique capabilities of SEM and discusses common sources of user error in drawing conclusions from…

The authors developed and tested new theoretical relations between approach and avoidance motivational traits and deviant work behaviors. Approach motivation was divided into 3 traits: personal mastery (i.e., desire to achieve), competitive excellence (i.e., desire to perform better than others), and behavioral activation system (BAS) sensitivity…

The influence of development and literacy upon syllabification in French was evaluated by comparing the segmental behavior of 4- to 5-year-old preliterate children and adults using a pause insertion task. Participants were required to repeat bisyllabic words such as "fourmi" ("ant") by inserting a pause between its two syllabic components…

Syntactic awareness has been linked to word reading and reading comprehension. The predictive power of two syntactic awareness tasks (grammatical correction, word-order correction) for both aspects of reading was explored in 8- and 10-year-olds. The relative contributions of vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and memory to each were assessed.…