Assesses the linguistic nature of home community, recollections of early experiences in second language learning, and attitudes and beliefs about language learning and bilingualism in English-speaking Canadian college students who study French. Surveys provide support for a causal model which indicates that sociocultural experiences influence…

The development of civic responsibility is considered to be an important component of healthy adolescent development. However, the study of its development has been relatively neglected and few studies have attempted to ground understanding of its development in a theoretical framework. The present study operationalized civic responsibility as…

This study aimed to demonstrate an approach to measuring the value-added contribution to academic achievement made by education, and to identify the direct and indirect effects of a school's practices and its contexts. Multilevel modeling using hierarchical linear model (HLM) was employed to adjust the effect of pupil background characteristics…

Decision-makers in organizations often make what appear as being intuitively obviously and reasonable decisions, which often turn out to yield unintended outcomes. The cause of such ineffective decisions can be a combination of cognitive biases, poor mental models of complex systems, and errors in thinking provoked by anxiety, all of which tend to…

Some 7400 schools belong to the global network of UNESCO's Associated School Project Network. They are committed to promoting ideals such as human rights, intercultural understanding, peace and environmental protection. This study is based on an extensive review undertaken in 2003. It discusses the origins and analyzes the achievements of the…

In this article, the authors attempt to employ a pedagogical tool, social perspective-taking, as a way to engage their students in the act of critical self-reflection, from a personal and professional point of view. The use of perspective taking devices, especially around issues of diversity (e.g., race, class, gender, ethnicity, and language) is…

While many aspects of educational careers have been examined in the literature on ethnic minorities, such as truancy, turnover and grades, downward mobility has rarely been studied. Using data on more than 10,000 students who entered secondary school in The Netherlands in 1989, we develop an event-history model for secondary school careers and we…

Remedial or developmental courses are the most common policy instruments used to assist underprepared postsecondary students who are not ready for college-level coursework. However, despite its important role in higher education and its substantial costs, there is little rigorous evidence on the effectiveness of college remediation on the outcomes…

A pattern of increased homicidal violence among adolescent youth in American inner cities has been documented and studied for some time. This elevated lethal violence has been observed to be a major cause of death in this age group and has been observed to be a particularly male phenomenon, especially for ethnic minorities. Both victims and…

This study is an attempt to determine if it is possible to establish causal direction between academic self-concept and academic achievement, focusing on whether academic self-concept and the subject-matter self-concepts of English and mathematics serve to generate academic, English, and mathematics achievements, respectively. This study of causal…

This paper analyzes the results of three studies about teacher causal explanation of failure in the Brazilian public elementary schools. Confronted with very high incidence of school dropout and retention, the investigators asked public school teachers to choose the main determinants of dropout and failure in their schools. Two studies were…

The structure of a concept generally labeled "teacher efficacy" is examined. A sample of 342 prospective and experienced teachers was administered an efficacy questionnaire adapted from the research of S. Gibson and M. H. Dembo (1984). Factor analytic procedures with varimax rotation were used to generate a 2-factor solution that accounted for 32…

The Migrant Education Region 1 of the Santa Clara County Office of Education organized a project to examine the conditions of 1454 migrant students in a sample of northern California schools. The project had two primary components: (1) the collection and analysis of information about migrant students, their family and school situations, and their…

Recent efforts targeting teenage pregnancy in the United States have marked a renewed conviction to reduce the level of childbearing among adolescents. Some of the behavioral, psychosocial, and ethnographic studies that explore the underlying motivation to delay sex and to effectively use contraception are the focus of this literature review.…

This study of 1,093 public high school students was designed to test an integrated theoretical model of delinquency, consisting of elements of social control and social learning theories, with LISREL procedures. The model confirmed with LISREL was very similar to the hypothesized model. The hypothesized model was fitted to data on one random…