In the area of achievement motivation, students' beliefs pertaining to achievement goals and perceived control have separately guided a large amount theoretical and empirical research. However, limited research has considered the simultaneous effects of goals and control on achievement. The purpose of this study was to examine primary and…

This paper examines how distinct trajectories of change in students' general views of group work over the duration of one single group assignment could be explained by multidimensional aspects of their experience and the overall instructional context. Science (336) and Education (377) students involved in a semester-long group assignment…

The control-value theory of academic emotions has emerged as a useful framework for studying the antecedents and consequences of different emotions in school. This framework focuses on the role of control-related and value-related appraisals as proximal antecedents of emotions. In this study, we take an individual differences approach to examine…

The self-regulation of learning behavior is an important key competence for university students. In this presented study, we aimed at fostering students' self-regulation of learning by means of a standardized learning journal. In two of four courses that were included in the study, students had to keep a structured learning diary and/or…

Histograms are widely used, but recent studies have shown that they are not as easy to interpret as it might seem. In this article, we report on three studies on the interpretation of histograms in which we investigated, namely, (1) whether the misinterpretation by university students can be considered to be the result of heuristic reasoning, (2)…

The aim of this study is to identify psychological topics within the areas of learning, development, and assessment that are especially important for teachers and should be included in the university teacher education curriculum. Based on the observation that teacher educators in psychology often face the challenge of having to select certain…

Transferring one's knowledge in new situations is usually associated with cognitively demanding processes. The paper explores an approach to facilitating transfer of knowledge by explicitly instructing learners in medium-level generalized but yet domain-connected knowledge structures that are applicable to a broader range of tasks in the…

To examine the relationship between prior knowledge, situational interest, and recall, 34 college students read 15 paragraphs that contained varying amounts of fictional material, rated how interesting they found each paragraph, and were later assessed on how much of the information they retained. Five of the paragraphs contained fictional items…

Past research has typically examined only single causal attributions for each student's academic performance; however, it may be the case that students make several unique attributions for a single outcome. Learning a new language has been reported as being a difficult task that may elicit a number of explanations for success and failure.…

Research on academic achievement at a university has mainly focused on success and persistence among first year students. Very few studies have looked at delay or failure in the completion of a final dissertation. However, this phenomenon could affect a substantial proportion of students and has considerable costs. The purpose of the present study…

This paper presents a prospective study aimed at identifying the predictors of academic achievement among first-year university students. It tries to develop an inclusive view of academic achievement by taking into account the possible differential impact of several predictors in two different faculties of the university. Some 317 university…

In times of teacher shortage, well-considered, goal-oriented teacher recruitment is important. An understanding of the reasons why different groups of students undertake teacher training would be useful in developing targeted campaigns. Against this background, the research question is as follows: what are the motivations prompting students to…

Teachers' pedagogical content beliefs about reading instruction are likely to predict progress in student achievement. Thus, in this study, 15 pre-service teachers gave reading promotion to low-performing sixth- and seventh-graders over a time period of 6 months. The pre-service teachers' pedagogical content beliefs were then related to…

The coping strategies used by students play a key role in their psychological well-being. This study examines the relationship between coping strategies and psychological well-being in a sample of 98 undergraduates aged between 19 and 42 years. Coping strategies were evaluated by means of the CRI-A (Moos, 1993), while psychological well-being was…

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between preservice teachers' (PTs) teacher efficacy beliefs and their constructivist-based teaching practices. Data were gathered through the questionnaire (Teachers' Sense of Efficacy Scale) and the observation protocol (Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol) administered to the…