Examines the role of achievement goals, ability, and high school performance in predicting academic success over students' college careers. Results reveal that mastery goals predicted continued interest, whereas performance-approach goals predicted performance. Ability measures and prior high school performance predicted academic performance but…

An integration of conceptions about attributional antecedents with those of attributional consequences is applied to achievement behavior. Results reveal that participants who were induced to make realistic attributions spent more time on tasks for which they had demonstrated high ability than on tasks for which they had demonstrated low ability.…

Examines the reading and mathematics growth of 180 children over four points, spanning 2nd and 3rd grades. Results reveal that the mathematics difficulty-only (MD) group grew at a faster rate in mathematics than did the mathematics difficulty-reading difficulty (MD-RD) group. In reading, the reading difficulty-only and MD-RD groups grew at about…

College students learned about botany through an agent-based multimedia game. Students received either spoken or identical on-screen text explanations. Results reveal that students scored higher on retention, transfer, and program ratings in narration conditions than in text conditions. The media--desktop displays or headmounted displays--did not…

Examines peer affiliations of aggressive children in a sample of 948 students from 4th through 6th grades. The deviant peer group hypothesis was partially supported. Two thirds of aggressive boys and one half of aggressive girls were most likely to be members of nonaggressive groups, whereas popular aggressive boys were most likely to be in…

Examines substance use between 10th and 12th grades in a predominantly African American sample of adolescents from an urban environment. Results indicate that low achievement and motivation, high truancy, and perception of peer substance use are associated with higher 10th grade substance use. Adolescents who perceive negative school attitudes…

Discusses three reasons to revise achievement goal theory: the importance of separating approach from avoidance strivings, the positive potential of performance-approach goals, and identification of the ways performance-approach goals can combine with mastery approach goals to promote optimal motivation. Reviews theory and research to substantiate…

In this response, the authors dispel interpretation of their critical review of research on performance-approach goals as support for a dichotomous perspective of achievement goal theory. Challenges the suggestion that accepting recent research findings and adopting a multiple goals perspective constitutes a theoretical revision of the assumption…

An instructional program focused on story theme was administered to 2nd and 3rd graders in a high-poverty school. Compared with traditional instruction, the program improved theme comprehension and identification of instructed themes in new stories. However, the program did not help students apply a theme to real-life situations or identify and…

Describes development and validation of a new self-report instrument, the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory, designed to assess adolescent and adult readers' metacognitive awareness and perceived use of reading strategies while reading academic materials. After a brief review of the literature, the development and validation…

History teachers and their 11th-grade students rated the relative importance of sections of instructional text on which teachers would be giving a test. Multilevel analysis revealed only a moderate correspondence between teachers in importance ratings. This suggested there were large differences between task demands of individual teachers,…

Two large studies identified substantial numbers of German-speaking children with marked dissociations between reading and spelling difficulties. Dysfluent reading in the absence of spelling difficulties was associated only with a naming speed deficit-assessed at school entrance-but not with phonological memory or phonological awareness deficits.…

Causal modeling was used to examine how primary students' language ability interacted with pace and redundancy of instructional language during an expository science lesson to explain students' attention and learning. Language ability and pace, mediated by students' attention to the lesson, accounted for variance in learning outcomes. Higher…

Examined the effects of both general and task-specific writing experiences on college students' writing-skill development. As predicted, repeated practice was associated with superior writing skills and after controlling for repeated practice, writing within a specific test domain was associated with superior writing skills. Implications for…

Contrary to assumptions about aversive effects of competition on achievement motivation, in this study young people saw academic contests as fair. When participants completed structural interviews on fair ways to organize science contests and on differentiation of skill and luck, age-related trends in their conceptions of procedural justice were…