Balanced reading instruction proposes an alternative to phonics only or whole language only programs; offers an efficient mixture of instructional approaches; and reconciles an array of learning styles. Although this balanced approach can not be interpreted monolithically, due to the various ways that whole language and phonics can be taught and…

The most important goal of any given training effort is to achieve learning at the individual, group/team, and organizational levels. This study used a repeated measures design to measure the change in employee perception of an organization's learning environment tin a large U.S. manufacturing company. The time period examined included an employee…

Infants start to interpret completed human actions as goal-directed in the second half of the first year of life. In a series of three studies, the understanding of a goal-directed but uncompleted action was investigated in 6- and 9-month-old infants using a preferential looking paradigm. Infants saw the video of an actor's reaching movement…

The tendency to underestimate egocentric distances in immersive virtual environments (VEs) is not well understood. However, previous research (A. R. Richardson & D. Waller, 2007) has demonstrated that a brief period of interaction with the VE prior to making distance judgments can effectively eliminate subsequent underestimation. Here the authors…

The research presented in this article integrates 3 theoretical perspectives in the field of motivation: expectancy-value, achievement goals, and interest. The authors examined the antecedents (initial interest, achievement goals) and consequences (interest, performance) of task value judgments in 2 learning contexts: a college classroom and a…

Education leaders know how to work hard, but how can they learn to work smarter and to lead better? There are bookshelves full of works on leadership based on the lives of luminaries ranging from Sun Tzu, a Chinese general who wrote "The Art of War," and General Patton to Machiavelli and Lincoln. Although they offer inspiration, such works do not…

When the author became president of Wheelock College in Boston in 2004, she asked the trustees and the entire campus community to engage in an innovative strategic planning and visioning process. The goal was to achieve consensus on a strategic vision for the future of Wheelock College by the end of her first year. This article discusses how…

Adopting a combination of expectancy-value and achievement goal theories, this study examined the role of self-efficacy, task value, and achievement goals in students' learning strategies, task disengagement, peer relationship, and English achievement outcome. A sample of 1475 Year-9 students participated in the study. A structural equation model…

The author explains how the film "Get Real" enabled him to explore, with a group of South African student teachers, the complex ways in which queer adolescents negotiate their daily lives, the struggles they have with "coming out" to their friends and families, the problems with representation, and the connections between…

Four studies were conducted on the development and validation of the Measure of Sexual Identity Exploration and Commitment (MoSIEC). Exploratory factor analysis of an initial item pool yielded a 22-item measure with 4 distinct factors assessing commitment, exploration, sexual orientation identity uncertainty, and synthesis/integration. Exploratory…

Historically grounded in a tradition of meeting local skills needs and training the children of the poor, vocational education and training (VET) in schools continues to struggle in terms of esteem and parity of status. Associated in the literature with the training of a reliable and compliant class of workers, it has also been tainted by its…

Using data from the long-running German Socio-Economic Panel Survey (SOEP), this paper provides evidence that life goals matter substantially to subjective well-being (SWB). Non-zero sum goals, which include commitment to family, friends and social and political involvement, promote life satisfaction. Zero sum goals, including commitment to career…

The dynamics of individual and situational interest and academic performance were examined in the college classroom and 7 semesters later in conjunction with achievement goals. At the beginning of an introductory psychology course, participants reported their initial interest in psychology, achievement goals, and situational interest in course…

Some professors claim college students seek the easy way out and prefer classes that lack challenge. In a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional ethnographic research study of the attainment of gender parity in an engineering department, it emerged that student attitudes toward challenge did not support this perception. By far, the majority of…

Followership, being an understudied concept, raises fundamental questions: How did followership develop? Why do people submit into becoming followers? The developmental trajectory for the development of individual attributes is as yet, uncharted. Current study provides an overview of assessed attributes of followers, as proposed by Antelo (2010).…