Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze data gathered in 1998 and 2011 from representative samples of women secondary school principals in Texas to identify differences in personal, professional, leadership, and school characteristics. Design/methodology/approach: Two proportionate, random samples were drawn of women secondary principals…

This article explores the potential offered by complexity theories for understanding language learners' sense of self and attempts to show how the self might usefully be conceived of as a complex dynamic system. Rather than presenting empirical findings, the article discusses existent research on the self and aims at outlining a conceptual…

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between the amount of time spent on homework in all subjects (HTAS), the time spent on mathematics homework (MHT), confidence in doing mathematics homework (HCM) and the mathematics achievement of students in Turkey, based on data from the programme for international student assessment…

Variations in perceptual and cognitive demands (load) play a major role in determining the efficiency of selective attention. According to load theory (Lavie, Hirst, Fockert, & Viding, 2004) these factors (a) improve or hamper selectivity by altering the way resources (e.g., processing capacity) are allocated, and (b) tap resources rather than…

Research on the dualistic model of passion has investigated harmonious and obsessive passion in many domains. However, few studies have investigated passion for studying and the role passion for studying plays in student engagement and well-being. The present study investigated the relationships between harmonious and obsessive passion for…

Career-related crises and major decisions, support for these, and job satisfaction were surveyed in 124 varied individuals from Mumbai, India. All participants were in the post-career-entry stage and engaged in paid work; they differed with regard to age (range 18-75 years), sex, marital status, religion, education, occupation, income, and…

It is possible that statistical learning (SL) plays a role in almost every mental activity. Indeed, research on SL has grown rapidly over recent decades in an effort to better understand perception and cognition. Yet, there remain gaps in our understanding of how SL operates, in particular with regard to its (im)mutability. Here, we investigated…

Despite a wealth of studies in the field, longitudinal assessments of both the stability and predictive utility of individual differences in preschoolers' understanding of the mind remain scarce. To address these gaps, we applied latent variable analyses to (a) experimental data gathered from a socially diverse sample (N = 101, 60 boys and 41…

Little is known about the origins of the pointing gesture. We sought to gain insight into its emergence by investigating individual differences in the pointing of 12-month-old infants in two ways. First, we looked at differences in the communicative and interactional uses of pointing and asked how different hand shapes relate to point frequency,…

Purpose: This project investigated the relationship of content and form in the narratives of school-age children. Method: Two samples of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their age-matched peers (British Columbia sample, "M" age = 9;0 [years;months], "N" = 26; Texas/Kansas sample, "M" age = 7;6,…

Perceptual decision-making performance depends on several cognitive and neural processes. Here, we fit Ratcliff's diffusion model to accuracy data and reaction-time distributions from one numerical and one verbal two-choice perceptual-decision task to deconstruct these performance measures into the rate of evidence accumulation (i.e., drift rate),…

This study investigated links between working memory and speech processing systems. We used delayed pseudoword repetition in fMRI to investigate the neural correlates of sublexical structure in phonological working memory (pWM). We orthogonally varied the number of syllables and consonant clusters in auditory pseudowords and measured the neural…

A novel assessment scale, the multi-dimensional scale for pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (MSPA), is reported. Existing assessment scales are intended to establish each diagnosis. However, the diagnosis by itself does not always capture individual characteristics or indicate the level of…

Research suggests that executive function (EF) may distinguish between children who are well- or ill-prepared for kindergarten; however, little is known about the test-retest reliability of measures of EF for children. We aimed to establish a battery of EF measures that are sensitive to both development and individual differences across the…

This study used fMRI to examine individual differences in the neural basis of causal inferencing. Participants with varying language skill levels, as indexed by scores on the vocabulary portion of the Nelson-Denny Reading Test, read four types of two-sentence passages in which causal relatedness (moderate and distant) and presence or absence of…