This article reports on findings from research aimed at examining new teachers' change over the first two years of teaching through their own perceptions, the perceptions of their students and analyses of the school culture in which they worked. Overall, a general pattern was found: most teachers developed according to a narrow, individual and…

Explains that the Sultanate of Oman is the only country in the world, other than the UK, to have adopted the national vocational qualification NVQ as its national system for vocational training. Assesses the extent to which centres in Oman have been successful in implementing the NVQ, and the extent to which the NVQ has contributed towards…

This article develops a model for potential working-class applicants to university, using multinomial logit regression to analyse a national UK sample, drawn from lower middle and working-class adults aged 16-30. Influential factors are belief in ability, preference for university rather than earning money, qualifications and family encouragement;…

This study examined sex differences in risk factors associated with adolescent depression in a large sample of boys and girls. Moderation and mediation explanatory models of the sex difference in likelihood of depression were examined. Findings indicate that the factors associated with depression in adolescent boys and girls are quite similar. All…

We report the results of a study on students' interest in physics at the end of their compulsory schooling in Israel carried out in the framework of the ROSE Project. Factors studied were their opinions about science classes, their out-of-school experiences in physics, and their attitudes toward science and technology. Students' overall interest…

Although optimism is generally regarded as a positive dispositional characteristic, unmitigated optimism can be problematic. The adaptiveness of overly optimistic expectations in novel or unfamiliar settings is questionable because individuals have little relevant experience on which to base such expectations. In this four-phase longitudinal…

The central focus of this article is the influence of the applied measure when the impact of overeducation is analyzed. For a database of Flemish school leavers, four alternative measures of overeducation are related to job satisfaction, mobility, training participation and wages. The magnitude and significance of the effects diverge between these…

A growing number of school districts in the United States are introducing formative assessment systems to measure student skills in core subjects throughout the year. The underlying logic is that providing teachers with timely information on student skills will enable them to improve instruction and better prepare students to excel on high-stakes,…

Faculty and administrators of a private Christian university responded to measures of overall, intrinsic, and extrinsic job satisfaction as well as organizational and religious commitment. The survey measured responses on a five-point Likert-type scale. Data were statistically analyzed by using descriptive statistics and factor analysis. Results…

A parade of people composed of young mothers, young professionals, middle-aged men and women and elder South Carolinians are marching across the parking lot into the former McAlister Square Mall. They have access to higher education because higher education has come to them--not in the form of a traditional campus but as the concrete realization…

In this article, we work towards developing a signature pedagogy for educational leadership preparation programs. A signature pedagogy that engenders theory-building processes and leadership practices includes complex case studies, inquiry-centered internships, collaborative and interdisciplinary leadership institutes, and continuous assessments…

Traditional methods of job and task analysis may be categorized as worker-oriented methods focusing on general human behaviors performed by workers in jobs or as job-oriented methods focusing on the technologies involved in jobs. The ability of both types of traditional methods to identify, understand, and communicate the skills needed in high…

This paper reviews the concept of performance funding (PF) in governmental and higher education budgeting at the state level, reports the results of a recent national study of state-level PF for higher education, and assesses the likelihood that PF will become a permanent fixture in most states' approaches to budgeting for higher education. The…

This study assessed the ability of high school advanced placement history students to choose the essay topic on which they can get the highest score. A second, equally important, question was whether the score on the chosen topic was more highly related to other indicators of proficiency in history than the score on the unchosen topic. Overall,…

ASQ (Assessing School-Aged Child Care Quality) is a system for determining the quality of school-age child care programs. The ASQ Program Observation Instrument is a ten-step, self assessment process to guide program improvement. This instrument does not work well in full-day programs that have a single focus, but works well in programs that offer…