A survey of 447 visitors to a Kansas zoo examined adult visitors' motivations for themselves and companions. In another survey, 118 zoo educators nationwide predicted visitor responses. Educators' predictions were fairly good for visitors' educational and recreational motives for attendance, less accurate for their social orientation, and poor…

This article presents a brief overview of developments in educational psychology over the last twenty-five years. It firstly presents an historical context by reviewing four basic emphases in educational psychology; cognitive psychology, behavioural psychology, social cognitive theory and humanism. The article then reviews the growth in cognitive…

Given the progressive loss of influence for the school relative to television in youngsters' everyday lives, this article describes the procedure and the results of including cartoons in the physics curriculum in secondary education. Work was carried out intensively with a small group of pupils and sporadically with a larger group. In the first…

This article presents a checklist that teachers and other education professionals can use when deciding which instructional materials to include in their content area instruction. The checklist addresses several considerations, such as the learners' prior knowledge, vocabulary levels, and motivation. In addition, characteristics of the text…

This research attempted to discover the degree to which performance on assessments that have no direct consequences for individual students can be attributed to students' motivational states in addition to their underlying achievement in the domains measured. If such findings were reliable, it would allow us to correct underestimates of domain…

This study analyzes similarities and differences in students' motivation to learn based on nationally representative samples of 15-year-olds from 26 countries. Scales of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation proved to be equivalent across countries but there seems to be a shift in meaning at the country level. Focusing on functional relationships…

Academic enablers have been defined as attitudes and behaviors that facilitate students' participation in, and benefit from, academic instruction in the classroom (J.C. DiPerna & S.N. Elliott, 2000). The purpose of this article is to provide practitioners with an overview of specific academic enablers (motivation, study skills, engagement, and…

Your students can be learning over summer vacation with these fun activities from the web. School will soon be out and your students will start summer vacation. How can you minimize "summer learning loss" over those days that kids are not in school? This year, send your students home with a Learning Log to record fun summer learning. It?s…

Adults' motivation to participate in continued education is of immediate interest, as lifelong learning is now considered as the solution to the pressing problems of increased levels of unemployment, not least among unskilled workers. Many theories concerning motivation and adult education maintain that individuals are innately motivated to learn,…

In this article, the author discusses how to motivate students and put fun back in the classroom. Through the inservice training on a Basic Intensive Week in William Glasser's Choice Theory, he learns that human beings are motivated by five basic human needs, fun, being one of them, is the genetic reward for learning. However, what is fun for one…

This study interviewed 15 incarcerated African American males about their participation in correctional education. The data was considered in light of various motivation theories with particular emphasis on a sociocultural theory of motivation. The largest amount of data described non-educational reasons subjects participate in correctional…

In this article, we address four main questions, including: What is self-regulated learning for? What key strategies do students need to guide and direct their own learning process? What cues in the learning environment trigger self-regulation strategies? What can teachers do to help student to self-regulate their learning, motivation, and effort…

In our cognitive motivational process model (Vollmeyer & Rheinberg, "Zeitschrift fur Padagogische Psychologie," 12:11-23, 1998) we assume that initial motivation affects performance via motivation during learning and learning strategies. These variables are also central for self-regulation theories (e.g., M. Boekaerts, "European Psychologist,"…

This article comments on the target paper by Vollmeyer and Rheinberg. As the emphasis of this special issue is on the assessment of self-regulation in learning, my commentary will focus on the various aspects of the research design, measures, and analyses.

This paper reports the initial results of a study that was designed to develop and test an instrument that could identify the elements of an individual's capacity for lifelong learning. We anticipated that the components of this capacity would include a complex mix of dispositions, lived experiences, social relations, values, attitudes and beliefs…