115 Italian and French teachers of high school and junior high school participated in a study aimed at investigating the impact of causal attribution on judgments of responsibility in case of academic failure of their pupils. Results support the attribution theory as conceptualized by Weiner (1986, 1995) and confirm the predictive utility of the…

While Garrison and colleagues' (2000) Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework has generated substantial interest among online learning researchers, it has yet to be subjected to extensive quantitative verification or tested for external validity. Using a sample of students from 55 online MBA courses, the findings of this study suggest strong…

This article reports on a study that investigated metacognitive knowledge or beliefs about language learning of 470 Turkish EFL learners in secondary education. The primary aims of the study were to explore what beliefs Turkish students in secondary education held about learning English as a foreign language (EFL), how their belief systems were…

To resolve the dispute amongst several studies, this research investigated whether the new generation of women engineering majors, who have been better academically prepared and presumably instilled with confidence, still experience lower levels of achievement than male engineering students. This study was framed under Bandura's (1986) triadic…

A principal components analysis of the Teacher Rating Scale-Child (TRS-C) of the Behavior Assessment System for Children was conducted with a cross-sectional cohort of 659 children in Grades 1 to 5. A predictive validity study was then conducted with a 2-year longitudinal sample of 206 children. The results suggested that scores from the resulting…

This is a construct validation study of a second language speaking assessment that reported a language profile based on analytic rating scales and a composite score. The study addressed three key issues: score dependability, convergent/discriminant validity of analytic rating scales and the weighting of analytic ratings in the composite score.…

Issues associated with drug and alcohol use as well as other delinquent behaviors among adolescents are of utmost importance to those concerned with student success in middle grades settings. In order to target preventive interventions for these problems, research suggests that educators should examine the risk and protective factors associated…

Purpose: The purpose of the population-based study in the paper is to report on progress in formulating instruments to measure children's resilience and associated protective factors in family, primary school and community contexts. Design/methodology/approach: In this paper a total of 2,794 students, 1,558 parents/caregivers, and 465 staff were…

This study explores variation in postgraduate students' and supervisors' conceptions of research. Based on earlier work, a Conceptions of Research Inventory (CoRI) was trialled on a mixed sample of postgraduate students and supervisors (n = 251). Exploratory factor analyses of resultant data yields a five-dimensional empirical model, the…

This study examined the factor structure of the parent and teacher versions of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ; R. Goodman, 1997) with a sample of first-grade children at risk for educational failure. The 5-factor model previously found in studies using exploratory factor analysis was fit to the data for both parent and teacher…

In times when human beings used to live in a natural environment, their needs were also provided for by natural resources. With the increase in population over time, human beings started to look for new resources willing to get "the most" and "the fastest". Just like the invention of steam, first, they increased the density of the resources and…

In this study 141 British parents estimated their own, and one of their children's IQ on their overall intelligence as well as on Gardner's (1983) [Gardner, H. (1983). "Frames of the mind: The theory of multiple intelligences." New York: Basic Books.] seven multiple ''intelligences''. Replicating previous studies, fathers gave higher…

Children served by school psychologists are frequently impacted by natural disasters. In the United States, tornadoes are a particular threat but have been studied very little. The current investigation developed a scale for assessing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in children in Kindergarten to Grade 6 impacted by a severe tornado. Six…

Based on studies carried out on qualitative data an instrument was constructed for investigating how larger numbers of students handle graphics. This test, consisting of 18 pages, each with its own graphic display(s) and a set of tasks, was distributed to 363 students, 15-16 years of age, from five different schools. The format of the questions…

The notion of item context effects implies that psychometric properties of an item or scale are altered by the presentation format, for example, blocked versus randomized. In an experimental study with high school students, the experimental group (n = 407) answered a four-dimensional academic self-concept questionnaire, in which the items were…