The three-fold purpose of this mixed methods study was to (a) analyze how preservice teachers' perceptions of teacher preparation program variables affect preservice teachers self-efficacy for literacy instruction, (b) determine how preservice teachers describe their teacher preparation program with regard to self-efficacy beliefs for…

Faced with expectations to improve student learning and increasing student alternatives, school districts are challenged to make system-wide and sustainable improvement in student learning outcomes. The national accountability movement is associated with a growing body of research that has considered the role of the district to influence student…

In order for schools to be successful in providing students with developmentally appropriate instruction and social experiences, an atmosphere of safety and protection is required. The recent spike in school shootings over the past 15 years has created a sense of urgency to examine the dynamics of school violence in order to generate and implement…

The role of emotional intelligence in effective teaching can be developed and enhanced through the use of an assessment instrument as a new evaluation and learning process for teachers. This involves a formative learning process for the qualities associated with excellent teaching characteristics and behaviors for use with teacher evaluation…

Introduction: Due to a considerable lack in empirical efforts and appropriate instruments, and theoretically rooted in a cognitive-motivational perspective on academic personality development, the present study analyzes a questionnaire for measuring EFL learners' self-perceptions of oral narrative competencies and perceived anxiety concerning oral…

Background: In England over the last two decades, there has been a growing interest in the role of English schools in developing, facilitating and supporting young people's community participation. A number of policy initiatives have sought to build the capacity and opportunities for youth participation. Research suggests, however, that pupils and…

Developing effective teaching practices within the higher education sector is an area of growing concern. Universities within the UK are judged on their competence in this area by mechanisms such as the National Student Survey and universities are anxious to be perceived as offering good quality teaching and learning experiences. The use of…

A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) tested the fit of Kelly and Lee's six-factor model of career decision problems among 188 college students. The six-factor model did not fit the data well, but a five-factor (Lack of Information, Need for Information, Trait Indecision, Disagreement with Others, and Choice Anxiety) model did provide a good fit.…

Background: The concepts of quality of life and family quality of life (FQOL) are increasingly being studied in the field of intellectual disabilities (ID) in China as important frameworks for: (1) assessing families' need for supports and services; (2) guiding organisational and service delivery system changes; and (3) evaluating quality family…

In this paper implicit function-based parameterizations for orthogonal and oblique rotation matrices are proposed. The parameterizations are used to construct Newton algorithms for minimizing differentiable rotation criteria applied to "m" factors and "p" variables. The speed of the new algorithms is compared to that of existing algorithms and to…

Aim: To gain more insight into the reasons and motives why people do not start taking ecstasy. Method: As part of the NeXT Study, we prospectively monitored 188 subjects who were ecstasy-naive at baseline but seemed likely to take ecstasy (MDMA) of their own accord during the course of the study. After an 11- to 26-month follow-up period, 160…

The study discussed the importance of test validity, often established when making decisions that may affect a student's future. The decisions made by policymakers and educators must not adversely affect any particular subgroups of students (i.e., year of administration, gender, ethnicity, level English proficiency, socioeconomic status, and…

According to empirical evidence and noted implications of sustainable agricultural development as a systemic and multi-actor process, integration of the research function of higher agricultural education in Iranian agricultural research systems seems to be an ongoing and considerable necessity. With the aim of identification and analysis of…

We apply the Supplemented EM algorithm (Meng & Rubin, 1991) to address a chronic problem with the "two-stage" fitting of covariance structure models in the presence of ignorable missing data: the lack of an asymptotically chi-square distributed goodness-of-fit statistic. We show that the Supplemented EM algorithm provides a…

Research suggests that student academic support plays a vital role at the college level as students often view communication with peers as their primary source of academic support (Thompson, 2008). This research advances the Student Academic Support Scale (SASS) as a method of assessing the frequency, importance, and mode of communicating academic…