Given that student retention is now one of the leading challenges faced by colleges and universities, research seeking to understand students' reasons for attrition is of critical importance. Two factors influence students' underachievement and subsequent dropping-out of college: self-efficacy and goal orientation. Self-efficacy refers to peoples'…

One of the ultimate goals of policy makers is to enable citizens to take advantage of a globalised world economy. This is leading them to focus on the improvement of education policies, ensuring the quality of service provision, a more equitable distribution of learning opportunities and stronger incentives for greater efficiency in schooling.…

A project known as SHAID, the Single Homeless Action Initiative, was founded in response to youth homelessness, a problem that had been growing since the 1980s, in a deprived area of County Durham. SHAID provides young people with advice, support, information, and life skills training on subjects such as home safety, budgeting, personal and food…

The objective of this study was to evaluate grade 9-12 students' motivation while engaged in two different engineering design projects: marble-sorter and bridge designs. The motivation components measured in this study were focused on students' intrinsic (IGO) and extrinsic (EGO) goal orientations, task value (TV), self-efficacy for learning and…

A survey of 77 Asian and Asian-American university students enrolled in first- and second-year Chinese language courses investigated the students' motivations for studying the language and their expectations of what they will gain from studying it. Results indicate two factors accounting for beginning Chinese language study: interest in cultural…

This report compares two approaches to incentive motivation in 82 college juniors and seniors, average age 21 years. One method uses will as a motivator; the other method focuses on skill or effective strategy use for enhancing recall and understanding of a particular body of information. In the first approach, a semiweekly test or spotquiz was…

"Deep" approaches to learning, as defined by Biggs (1987) and others, would generally mean that a student is interested in the academic task, searches for meaning in the task, personalizes the task, integrates aspects of the task into a whole, sees relationships between this whole and previous knowledge, and tries to theorize about the…

A study examined the experiences and perceptions of 27 female welfare recipients who were required to go back to school or lose their welfare benefits. The women were observed as they participated in a highly interactive career and life planning (C&LP) class that met 5.5 hours per day 4 days per week for 1 month. A random sample of the women was…

Findings of a study that examined the relationship of students' perceptions of parents' and teachers' involvement and autonomy support to student motivation are presented in this paper. Based on a larger process model of academic achievement (Ryan and Stiller 1991), students' perceptions of parent and teacher autonomy support and involvement were…

Some affective/emotional factors in the foreign language learning situation that tend to hinder the learner in learning the target language are analyzed. Beginning with an explanation of theory concerning the "affective filter" and learning, the discussion proceeds to research findings on self-concept and their relationship to the affective filter…

Topic knowledge, discourse knowledge, and contextual awareness are now considered crucial for "good writing" by many writing researchers. It is time for writing instructors to stop conducting composition classes as though substantive knowledge is a far lesser issue than "rhetorical skill." Composition teachers can offer…

Examines current grading procedures and expresses the desire that children succeed in school, not because of the threat of grades, but because they are interested and motivated.

This article is a very general discussion of foreign language instruction and the nature of foreign language learning. (KM)

Using examples drawn from Transactional Analysis, the author explains the use of constructive criticism (the expression of the "Adult" state) as a positive motivating force, and comparesit to the debilitating effect of destructive criticism (expressing either the "Child" or the "Parent" ego state.) (AJ)

A discussion of the role of transfer of native-language knowledge to second language learning proposes that language transfer is as much a sociolinguistic process as a psycholinguistic one. The term "sociolinguistics" is used in a broad sense to incorporate all social factors that affect language, both the relatively static characteristics of an…