Examines the effects of academic self efficacy and optimism on students' academic performance, stress, health, and commitment to remain in school. Results reveal that academic self efficacy and optimism were strongly related to performance and adjustment, both directly on academic performance and indirectly through expectations and coping…

Administered standardized measures of cognitive ability, academic achievement, classroom learning behavior, and school social-emotional adjustment to students aged 6-17 years (N=1,268). Analyses revealed four distinct and reliable student performance factors (Disciplined Behavior, Motivation, Verbal Learning, Nonverbal Learning). The performance…

Reviews studies indicating that performance-approach goals are associated with adaptive patterns of learning but note that, in other studies, these goals have been unrelated or negatively related to the same outcomes. Argues that there is a need to consider for whom and under what circumstances performance goals are good. (Contains 93 references.)…

Examines self-handicapping and defensive pessimism, the factors that predict these strategies, and the associations between these strategies and a variety of academic outcomes. Findings reveal that task orientation negatively predicts both self-handicapping and defensive expectations and positively predicts reflectivity. Students high in…

Proposes a new measure of individual differences in reading comprehension ability. Components of the task predict performance on a test of global reading comprehension and on a range of specific comprehension tests. Asserts that the task is better at predicting reading comprehension than is a typical working memory span task. (Contains 76…

Examines the use of drawing as a learning strategy for 5th- and 6th-grade students reading science text. Three experimental drawing conditions and a reading control tested the hypothesis that drawing is effective only when students are supported during the construction process. Results were generally consistent with the proposed hypotheses.…

Younger and older adults participated in nine hours of either strategy training, interest strategy training, or no training. Both trained groups reported positive changes in reading, but only the structure strategy group showed increased total recall from a variety of texts and informative video. Structure strategy training increased the amount of…

Examines teaching rime analogy or letter recoding reading strategies to prereaders. Results reveal that experience with rime analogy increased letter recoding ability, but teaching in letter recoding did not enhance rime analogy. Children learned to read with a rime analogy or letter recoding reading strategy, and many developed new reading…

Investigates differential effects of goal specificity on maze learning among 40 young and 40 old adults. Results confirmed hypotheses that the presence or absence of a specific goal would disproportionately compromise or enhance, respectively, elderly people's performance. Suggests that instruction based on cognitive load theory can compensate for…

Presents research on and discusses the redundancy effect, consistent with a dual-channel theory of multimedia learning in which adding on-screen text can overload the visual information-processing channel, causing learners to split their visual attention between two sources. In research, lower transfer performance also occurred when interesting…

Presents findings from a survey that assessed 922 undergraduates' perceptions of undergraduate science classes. Correlational analyses and evidence from distinct groups supported the survey's construct validity. Students reported room for improvement of the science faculty's pedagogical practices. Results indicate that how information is taught is…

Assesses two aspects of the validity of verbal reports in children's subtraction: reactivity and veridicality. Results reveal that students were able to able to provide veridical strategy reports, and that the instruction to verbally report had few effects on task performance. Informal findings indicate that students had less difficulty reporting…

Studies relationships between teacher epistemology, classroom interactions, and related student epistemologies and identities. Results indicate that classroom discourse, orchestrated by the teacher, likely mediates many of the associations between teacher and student epistemologies documented here. (Contains 36 references and an appendix.) (GCP)

College students read one of two versions of a chapter of text in which target topic labels appeared either with high frequency or low frequency. These two experiments show that readers with low prior knowledge are more likely to make use of surface cues to identify elements of text. (BF)

Investigated caption use, sound, and reading behavior of 76 children who had just completed 2nd grade. The present study indicated that beginning readers recognize more words when they view television that uses captions. Captions, by evoking efforts to read, appeared to help a child focus on central story elements and away from distracting…