Bilingualism (Sanz, 2000), motivation (Pintrich, 1989), and language aptitude (Grigorenko, Sternberg, and Ehrman, 2000) are crucial individual differences that contribute to successful adult language learning. Since Gardner's (1985) seminal work on motivation, many studies have shown that motivation is dynamic and that it affects language…

The purpose of this study was to examine individual differences in attitudes toward Audience Response Systems (ARSs) in secondary school classrooms. Specifically, the impact of gender, grade, subject area, computer comfort level, participation level, and type of use were examined in 659 students. Males had significantly more positive attitudes…

Research suggests that student enrollment in developmental level courses at the postsecondary education level increases annually. This is occurring because underprepared and/or nontraditional students' reading, writing, or math skills are inadequate to meet the challenges of college-level work. This article focuses on self-explanations as an…

As viewed from two sides such as teacher and student, in this article, we explore the human-based teaching reform for the college professional course of materials Science and Engineering, point out the qualities and conditions that professional teacher should possess in the process of human-based teaching reform of professional course and the…

This longitudinal study examined individual differences and correlates of focused attention when toddlers were approximately 18 months old (T1; n = 256) and a year later (T2; n = 230). Toddlers' attention and negative emotionality were reported by mothers and non-parental caregivers and rated globally by observers. Toddlers' focused attention also…

The ideas of Vygotsky [Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). "Thinking and speech." In "The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky," (Vol. 1). New York: Plenum. (Original work published 1934.)] have been increasingly influential in accounting for social-environmental influences on the development of social understanding (SU). In the first part of this article, I…

The teaching of an invented language rule has been proposed as a possible non-biased, language-independent assessment technique useful in differentiating young L2 learners with specific language impairment from their typically developing peers. The current study explores these notions by testing typically developing sequential bilingual children's…

The present study examines private speech and strategy-use patterns for solving simple number fact problems in addition. The progressive differentiation by grade between children's levels of private speech internalization--including silence--was investigated and related to children's developmental patterns for subcategories of strategy-use…

Background: Social phobia aggregates in families. The genetic contribution to intergenerational transmission is modest, and parenting is considered important. Research on the effects of social phobia on parenting has been subject to problems of small sample size, heterogeneity of samples and lack of specificity of observational frameworks. We…

Antecedents of interpersonally directed forms of citizenship and counterproductive behaviors (i.e., interpersonal helping and harming, respectively) have been studied most often under the broad categories of individual differences and job attitudes. Although these behaviors often are exhibited within the confines of interpersonal relationships,…

Children's agentic and communal goals were examined in hypothetical "conflict," "group entry," "victimization," and "positive" situations (N = 310, 11-13 years). Multilevel modeling was used to separate the variation in goals to the between- and within- (i.e., situation-specific) individual levels. About half of the variation in goals was due to…

According to Smith and Nelson [Smith, L.E., Nelson, C.E., 1985. "International intelligibility of English: directions and resources." "World Englishes" 3, 333-342.], "intelligibility" refers to word/utterance recognition, whereas "comprehensibility" is the understanding of word/utterance meaning. This study…

Background: The sexual lives of people with intellectual disability is made complex by the involvement and influence of social service providers, whose beliefs and values have a great impact on the support they provide. We hypothesized that social service providers' role, educational level and service in which they worked could affect attitudes…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the Big Five personality factors, measured by the NEO Personality Inventory Five-Factor Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1992), and vocational confidence across Holland's hexagon, measured by the Skills Confidence Inventory (SCI; Betz, Borgen, & Harmon, 2005), were useful in discriminating among…

In 1999, things were dismal at Lebanon, Pennsylvania's Harding Elementary School. Many kids in this former coal town started at a disadvantage and never seemed to catch up. They were bored with books about "frogs on logs," says then-new principal Cheryl Champion. Since they were not engaged, they acted out. Harding's classroom…