This study of 118 students who placed into basic skills sections of College English suggests that students' self-beliefs may be a particularly important predictor of success in weak writers in first-semester courses. Two types of writing self-efficacy scales--a writing tasks/skills scale and an approach-to-writing scale--were developed to follow…

National background of users may influence the process of technology acceptance. The present study explored this issue with the new, integrated technology use model proposed by Sun and Zhang (2006). Data were collected from samples of college students in India, Mauritius, Reunion Island, and United States. Questionnaire methodology and…

This article attempts to present a novel application of a method of measuring accuracy for academic success predictors that could be used as a standard. This procedure is known as the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, which comes from statistical decision techniques. The statistical prediction techniques provide predictor models and…

Children with significant behavior problems are at risk for poor school adaptation and a host of deleterious school outcomes. Given the time children spend in school, there is a need to better understand the normative contexts and processes within schools that may enhance the positive adaptation of children with significant behavior problems. This…

This study reports the impact of high sensitivity to early exchange in 11th-grade, CSCL triads solving well- and ill-structured problems in Newtonian Kinematics. A mixed-method analysis of the evolution of participation inequity (PI) in group discussions suggested that participation levels tended to get locked-in relatively early on in the…

Background: Previous studies of outcome for children with early language delay have focused on measures of early language as predictors of language outcome. This study investigates whether very early processing skills (VEPS) known to underpin language development will be better predictors of specific language and social communication outcomes than…

Part and partial correlation coefficients are used to measure the strength of a relationship between a dependent variable and an independent variable while controlling for one or more other variables. The present paper discusses the uses and limitations of partial correlations and presents a small heuristic data set to illustrate the discussion.…

This paper considers the case of violence between siblings in the family, and describes findings based on a U.S. national sample that show the relatively frequent use of violence by weaker siblings against more powerful siblings. Analysis and theoretical discussion shows that even though strong actors have greater means for using violence, and…

Most research in psychotherapy has focused on adult clients, while child psychotherapy has been comparatively neglected. To identify predictors of outcome in psychotherapy for children, the relationship between several client, therapist, and economic variables was examined. Subjects were 268 children and their families who had completed treatment…

Testing of the television preference of twelve retardates showed that the preference technique seems adequate for ascertaining some of the reinforcing variables in the television programs. (Author/KM)

A small multivariate data set is used to illustrate the usefulness of structure coefficients when interpreting results of educational experiments. Data are analyzed using a multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), and results are interpreted in three different ways to determine the contribution of individual variables to prediction: (1) using…

The present study investigated factors influencing the decision of employees, who, faced with a facility relocation, either relocated to a new location or lost their current jobs. A large chemical company decided to close a research and development laboratory located in New England and to transfer employees to a laboratory located in the…

Hormone levels and changes in hormone levels were evaluated three times across a 1-year period as concurrent and predictive correlates of the socio-emotional functioning of 56 boys 10- to 14-years-old and 52 girls 9- to 14-years-old who represented the five stages of Tanner's criteria of pubertal development. The hormone measures were serum levels…

The making of a decision implies a choice between competing alternative solutions. In a decision-making context including multiple criteria, the criteria (or their related variables) are placed in relation to each other. This provides a comparison to some fixed point or origin, reducing the problem to one which can be solved by optimization as in…

Accuracy of personality judgment has been found to be a source of individual differences in memory organization. In order to understand the cognitive process mediating memory organization, accuracy in intuitive personality judgments was assessed in 18 female nurses by the "programmed case" method. This task casts an actual life history into a…