The concept of school engagement has attracted increasing attention as representing a possible antidote to declining academic motivation and achievement. Engagement is presumed to be malleable, responsive to contextual features, and amenable to environmental change. Researchers describe behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement and recommend…

This study examines the out-of-class learning activities undertaken, at the students' volition, by groups of students. Data were gathered through 57 individual and 15 focus group interviews with university students in Hong Kong. Group activities reported included: copying, sharing material, consulting peers, consulting teachers, studying and…

The purpose of this work is to identify process measures of student interaction with a course management system (CMS). Logs maintained by Web servers capture aggregate user interactions with a Website. When combined with a login system and context from the course recorded in the CMS, more detailed measures of individual student interaction can be…

Disruptive behavior may be associated with poor academic achievement due to covariance with attention problems and low IQ. Evidence is based on clinical samples and on associations between problem behaviors in young children and later achievement difficulties. The contemporaneous relations and their genetic and environmental influences have not…

Behaviour disorders represent a major concern in today's schools. One widely used method to address these problems has been social skills training. To date, the efficiency of this training is modest with respect to the transfer, maintenance and generalization of the newly learned skills. The goal of this study is to compare the profiles of…

Concerns about school safety and disruptive behavior, as well as increasing use of zero tolerance policies, have resulted in escalating rates of exclusionary disciplinary practices (out-of -school suspension and expulsion) in America?s schools. The present study examines suspension rates in Kentucky middle schools (N=161), using both quantitative…

In this article, the author describes the liberatory and critical classroom she tried to create with preservice teachers. She reflects on how the perceptions of her teaching and of her class by one student led him to feel silenced inside the classroom but liberated to express his views of the community in e-mail dialogues. Anthony's actions in…

While school bullying in Japan, Ijime, has been a topic of major public concern since the 1980s, few qualitative studies have been conducted to examine its nature and correlates. Through a case study of 30 ninth graders in a Japanese middle school, the study found that Ijime has complex group dynamics in its onset and process. The analysis of…

Authors reviewed the theoretical history of the "motivation" construct, and its utilization within past/current health behavior research. Textbooks and review articles functioned as sources for the theoretical history review. Research published within a 10-year period (1993-2002) in four health promotion journals (all with impact factors greater…

A variety of coding schemes are available for direct observational assessment of student classroom behavior. These instruments have been used for a number of assessment tasks including screening children in need of further evaluation for emotional and behavior problems, diagnostic assessment of emotional and behavior problems, assessment of…

Discipline affects students' rights and interests greatly. If there is no scientific and efficient system to standardize it, the disciplinary rights of students will be easily abused, which will not only infringe on students' rights and interests but also give rise to campus disputes. The problems of the disciplinary system in Chinese primary and…

Positive behavior support (PBS) offers schools a structured approach to address children's behavior from the individual level to the schoolwide level. Professionals are encouraged to include all relevant stakeholders, especially families, in actively planning, implementing, and evaluating the supports provided (Carr et al., 2002). However,…

In this evaluation we used Messick's construct validity as a conceptual framework for an empirical study assessing the validity of use, utility, and impact of office discipline referral (ODR) measures for data-based decision making about student behavior in schools. The Messick approach provided a rubric for testing the fit of our theory of use of…

Group supervision is recommended in the literature as an efficient method for field education, especially in the context of reduced agency resources for field instruction. This qualitative interview study explored the experiences of 18 MSW students who received group supervision as the primary method of field instruction. The competence of the…

Recent research on online learning has explored the dense fabric of social presence giving us a better understanding of the rhythms of the teaching-learning exchange. Quantitative studies, especially, have concluded with calls for deeper, more intensive explorations into what happens in online learning environments (Rourke, Anderson, Garrison, &…