Career indecision can be divided into two categories: developmental and chronic indecision. The former is generally viewed as a developmentally normal problem resulting from a lack of information on the self and on the world of work, whereas the latter is defined as a pervasive inability to make a decision about one's career. The goals of the…

A population of 12-19 year-old adolescents (n = 994) was selected from a pool of 7264 students in order to study adolescent's perception of autonomy. Eleven behavioural autonomy items were elected by the adolescents and used to evaluate the frequency of desire, achievement and disobeying parents in early (12-13 year-old) and late (18-19 year-old)…

The adjustment to college represents a potentially invigorating and unsettling time for students. As students are socialized into college experiences, they must simultaneously navigate issues of identity, uncertainty, and change--all of which take place in a dynamic, ever-changing communication environment. The purpose of this study was to explore…

The right of parents to home educate is sometimes described as a "human right." Underlying this "rights claim" is the perception that attempts to restrict home education are both unnecessary and dangerous. "Unnecessary," because home education does not harm children or deprive them of the right to education and…

A study is reported of the use of a personal journal as a tool for transferring learning from the training room to the workplace. The targeted learning event was an English for Communication training programme. This programme was an intensive four-day course that grouped together participants from the non-UK sites of the aircraft manufacturer…

Amartya Sen's writings have articulated the importance of human agency, and identified the need for information on agency freedom to inform our evaluation of social arrangements. Many approaches to poverty reduction stress the need for empowerment. This paper reviews "subjective quantitative measures of human agency at the individual level." It…

One goal of most courses is to prepare students with basic knowledge and skills associated with the course content. Mastery learning can be a rewarding way to encourage greater student achievement by allowing students multiple attempts to demonstrate an understanding of course concepts. This may involve repeated submissions of individual…

The purpose of this study was to examine self-determination and achievement motivation as predictors of successful school performance for high school African American males enrolled in an urban Texas school district. The students (N = 108) were placed into two distinct groups: higher-performing and lower-performing African American males based…

Projects are not new in education (for example, see Kilpatrick, 1918), but in the last 20 years, they seem to have become more popular in second language education, as projects fit with emphases on communication, tasks, cooperation among students, learner autonomy, curricular integration, alternative assessment, links between the classroom and the…

In a bid to curb violence incurred via the abuse of teacher authority, some educators appear to denounce all forms of imposition. The author of this paper refers to this aversion to imposition and the romantic practices it promotes as "educational niceness". This essay is written to furnish a theoretical justification for educational imposition.…

Predictors of persistence previously found useful in distinguishing successful from unsuccessful distance learners were assembled in a 60-item survey. The survey was completed by 259 learners enrolled in associate's, bachelor's, or master's level distance learning courses in accounting, business administration, information services, criminal…

Purpose: This paper aims to demonstrate that students' self-evaluations contribute to improving academic results and life skills. Design/methodology/approach: Taking as reference a group of previously validated scales (part 1: measurement), a causal model is developed. Hypotheses are tested through the structural equations methodology by using the…

On the premise that there are certain practices that influence students' intrinsic motivation for academic engagement, this study examined the congruence between a teacher's goals and practice with regard to autonomy. Self-report data were collected on seven sixth-grade elementary school teachers concerning their goals for their math classes.…

This paper reports the results of an initial exploration into the attitudes and practices of some selected Canadian distance educators regarding a learner-centered view of education. Twenty-nine Canadian distance education teachers and administrators responded to questionnaires concerning attitudes toward distance education, student autonomy in…

The necessity of balancing the need for togetherness and the need for separateness in intimate relationships has been well documented in family research. To investigate cross national differences in the value placed on autonomy versus togetherness in close relationships, 2,079 college students from Hungary, Ireland, Mexico, the Netherlands, the…