Experiment compares students receiving an instructional intervention designed to increase intrinsic motivation with students receiving traditional instruction. Concept-oriented reading instruction (CORI) integrated reading and language arts with science inquiry, emphasizing learning goals, real-world interaction, competence support, and…

Investigates the effect of collaboration on problem-solving performance and learning in the context of a complex, video-based mathematics problem. High-achieving 6th-grade students (N=96) were assigned to collaborative or individual problem-solving conditions. Results reveal that students in the collaborative condition outperformed students in the…

Compares the adequacy of five theories to predict dropping out of high school before the 10th grade. Theories include full mediation by academic achievement and direct effects related to general deviance; deviant affiliation; family socialization; and structural strains. Results reveal that none of the theories was fully adequate to explain the…

Examines the contribution of handwriting to learning to write in an experimental training study. First-grade children experiencing handwriting and writing difficulties participated in sessions designed to improve accuracy and fluency of their handwriting. In comparison to their peers in a control condition, participating students made greater…

Reports on a study in which students with and without learning disabilities wrote persuasive essays about controversial topics. One group of students was given an elaborated goal that included explicit subgoals based on the elements of argumentation. Sixth-grade students in the elaborated goal condition produced more persuasive essays and included…

A population of 12-19 year-old adolescents (n = 994) was selected from a pool of 7264 students in order to study adolescent's perception of autonomy. Eleven behavioural autonomy items were elected by the adolescents and used to evaluate the frequency of desire, achievement and disobeying parents in early (12-13 year-old) and late (18-19 year-old)…

Empathy has been suggested to facilitate effective collaborative problem solving in children. The current study adapted the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI, Davis, 1980), a well-validated empathy measure for adults, for use with children aged 8 and 9 years. Four hundred and thirteen school children aged between 7;11 and 9;11 years completed…

The procedure for the development of a measure of humour appreciation among a convenience sample of 53 primary school children attending a one-week summer program held in Hong Kong is described. Two sets of visual stimuli depicting pictures of local celebrities portrayed either veridically (congruously) or incongruously were established from a…

The concurrent validity of the New Zealand Ministry of Education's Health and Physical Education Assessment (HPEA) (Crooks & Flockton, 1999) was examined with the respective items from the Movement Assessment Battery for Children (Henderson & Sugden, 2000) and the Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency (Bruininks, 1978) on manual dexterity,…

The development of a humor measure was described in a brief report in this journal. In that report, a series of suitable congruous and incongruous pictures were developed with a community sample of children. The findings of that study were consistent with those reported by others (Chik, 2001; Masten, 1989; Schultz, 1972), indicating that…

This exploratory study examined the range of gender-based achievement motivation patterns evident in a group of Australian final year high school students. Single, dual and multiple goal complexes were compared, enabling an evaluation of the relative impact of each of the goals on these patterns, as well as their relationships with academic…

The 20 item Child Anxiety Scale (CAS) was administered to 343 elementary school children. Unweighted Least Squares extraction with oblique rotation produced 3 correlated primary factors that were interpreted as matching factors C, L and O of the Sixteen Personality Factors questionnaire for adults. Of particular interest was the factor L pattern…

The current study examined the extent to which kindergarten children display behaviour problems in the clinical range at both home and kindergarten. Differences and similarities between parents' and teachers' responses to misbehaviour were also assessed. The co-occurrence of problems at home and kindergarten was assessed using the Preschool and…

This project examined some of the common constraints on reliable cognitive assessment for children over time. Repeated measures design (n = 133) was with younger (5 & 6 year old, n = 64) and older (7 & 8 year old, n = 69) children. Results showed that children's self-concepts moderated the test-retest reliability over extended intervals for…

Adolescents from grade 9 in Sydney Australia (N = 60) were interviewed regarding why they would or would not consider pursuing maths-related careers. Open-ended interview data explored the comprehensiveness of explanations within the Expectancy-Value framework. The Expectancy-Value model is the major motivational framework for explaining students'…