This quantitative study investigated the predictive worthiness of the predictor variable indices--locus of control, self-efficacy, and gender identity--to ascertain if elevated levels of the predictors influence academic performance outcomes (individually as well as interactionally). The study theorized that students with increased levels of locus…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the strategies employed by senior level first-generation college students (FGCS) as it pertains to academic self-efficacy, parental support, and cultural capital and their role in college enrollment and matriculation. The examination also included additional emergent factors that contributed to FGCS…

As a starting point, this paper raises various questions to explain the teaching conditions that exist in rural communities and the learning conditions faced by children assigned to the rural community education mode. Equity and competitiveness are the conceptual axis used in the descriptive construction a documentary analysis and my personal…

Academic redshirting is the act of keeping a child out of school for an additional year before kindergarten. This practice has become prevalent in America as kindergarten standards become more rigorous. There are few examples in the literature of research that explores the differences between children who have been academically redshirted and…

The papers in this special issue provide a comprehensive examination of the prevalence and implications of positive biases in perceived academic competence at different ages in different countries. Main results showed that marked positive biases were rare, were associated with performance goals, were more adaptive than negative biases, but were…

Gifted students often fail to achieve at a superior level in one or more academic areas. In this reply to an article by Assouline, Nicpon, and Whiteman, the author reviews various explanations for this phenomenon, including motivation/interest, learning opportunities, and error in measuring students' ability-achievement discrepancies. The author…

The transition from kindergarten to first grade has been described as a critical period for children's academic development. Furthermore, research indicates that peer status is connected with academic adjustment, yet the underlying processes remain unclear. By means of a two-year longitudinal study during kindergarten and first grade (N = 153), we…

This manuscript draws from a 2-year multiple-case ethnography on the educational experiences of Mexican immigrant families with California middle schools. The article explores the influence of the political landscape and raciolinguistic ideologies surrounding the nature and implementation of a middle school dual language bilingual program, and it…

Remediation has become one of the greatest barriers to student success and disproportionately affects the persistence and retention rates of African American community college students. Nearly 70% of the African American students at community colleges required remediation, which results in low persistence and graduation rates for these students.…

For the past three years, SELF (Sports, Education, Life Skills, and Faith) has focused on improving academic, behavioral, and social skills of students at Key, Revere, and Meyerland middle schools in the Houston Independent School District (HISD). Tutorials, an essay contest, character-building lessons, sports, a high-school bridge program, and…

Ten years ago when Ruffalo Noel Levitz (RNL) published its annual study of freshman motivations, those students were entering college in the shadow of the worst recession since the Great Depression. That report, which examined attitudes of students from 2009, provided insight into their motivations, attitudes, and needs in the midst of a very…

As student populations continue to become more diversified, institutions must understand students' academic preparedness to better serve them. A significant amount of research and literature focuses on experiences of students whose parents had little or no college education. Although these first-generation students have much in common with other…

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HH) children reveal considerable difficulty in producing an organised and complete narrative. The current study conducted a three-month intervention to improve D/HH children's storytelling ability through training in arranging episodes of temporal scripts, and telling the stories they created. We examined 65 D/HH…

The authors compared the performance of third-grade students testing on answer sheets with those testing on machine-scored test booklets. The 1,832 students in the nationally representative sample were assigned at the campus level to complete the Stanford Achievement Test Series, Tenth Edition in 1 of 4 conditions: (a) Form A answer sheet, (b)…

The purposes of the present study were to investigate (a) how the subjectively perceived achievement goals of significant others would predict the academic self-efficacy and achievement goals of Korean adolescents and (b) how those self-efficacy and achievement goals in turn predicted their achievement. We also compared these predictive…