Throughout the world, school grade structures are most variable during the early adolescent years when students can find themselves in a variety of school models. This paper investigates the impact of two popular school models in the United States (middle school and K-8) on the self-esteem and self-concept of early adolescents. Based on mixed…

This paper reports the development of critical thinking of urban high school students in the Chinese city of Xi'an. It presents the assessment of the students' two components of critical thinking: dispositions towards critical thinking and critical thinking skills, using the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory and the California…

This article addresses the impact of selected sports media events on the active participation of a group of young people aged 14/15. Its particular focus is on an intense period of media sport coverage during the European Soccer Championships (Euro '96), the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships and the Atlanta Olympics and on how a group of British…

The objective of this study was to analyse sex stereotypes in Spanish high-school students. Three hundred boys and girls from 12 to 17 years old participated in this study by completing a 41-item survey about their preferences for different body types. The survey was applied using a set of visual triggers. Analysis of data showed that body…

Motivation is one of the most significant predictors of success in foreign language learning. While individual and Governmental commitment to the learning of foreign languages is growing throughout most of Europe and across the globe, it is stuttering in the UK. An entitlement to language learning in primary school is not yet fully in place,…

This article reports on the outcomes of an action research project on gender and science education carried out in two upper secondary schools in Sweden. The article focuses on how student voices draw on wider societal discourses when they talk about what it means to be natural science students at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The…

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…

This article examines the sociocognitive processes contributing to intention to use contraception and willingness to engage in unsafe sex, using extended versions of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the Prototype/Willingness model (Gibbons & Gerrard, 1995, 1997). Data were obtained from a questionnaire delivered to all the pupils in…

This article analyzes the body of research literature that has brought us to the state of our current knowledge regarding learning strategies in general and learning strategies Instruction as they relate to second language acquisition (SLA). Three categories are discussed: (1) types of learning strategies, (2) learning autonomy and strategy…

In this study, the Felder learning styles inventory was administered to students who were non-English majors in a Chinese University. Descriptive statistics identified that participants do vary in their preference for particular learning styles with a great variety of learning style preferences distributed unevenly among the sample population. A…

Background: Stereotype threat research revealed that negative stereotypes can disrupt the performance of persons targeted by such stereotypes. This paper contributes to stereotype threat research by providing evidence that domain identification and the difficulty level of test items moderate stereotype threat effects on female students' maths…

Studies on online social relationships have focused on how Internet use is associated with sociability, but have not compared the quality of online with offline relationships. On the other hand, studies on adolescent friendship formation have used school samples disregarding the Internet as a new social context for it. We took a different…

Using data from the reading component of the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (N = 113,050), the effects of gender and curricular track for nine sub-scores of reading achievement were investigated. Only students indicating that they did not receive additional programming support were included in the analysis. Gender accounted for less than…

This research aimed to establish if the presentation of two positive stereotypes would result in choking under pressure for identified male mathematics students. Seventy-five 16 year old men, who had just commenced their AS-level study, were either made aware of their gender group membership (single positive stereotype), their school group…

In this study, the author investigated the relationships among Turkish students' perceived computer skills, computer attitudes, quantitative skills, qualitative skills, and gender. The author collected data from a total of 362 undergraduate students. He found that gender was a significant variable to predict computer attitudes but not perceived…