There are important issues for rural communities in Australia in relation to the provision of education for their young people (HREOC, 2000). This is particularly so in an era when successful completion of education is becoming increasingly vital as the pressures of a globalised economy mean that many rural and farming businesses are struggling to…

For many teachers, an appointment to a rural school is their first experience of living and working in a context where they are highly visible and are likely to be known of and known about by far more people than they know of and know about. Space for "making errors" and recovering from them without impairment to becoming an effective teacher, is…

A structural equation modelling analysis was used to test the mediating effect of achievement goal factors on the relationship between Egyptian adolescents' perception of parental involvement and academic achievement. The perception of Parental Involvement Scale and Achievement Goal Questionnaire was administered to a sample of 255 first-year…

This paper reports on a conference held at the Leyte Institute of Technology, Tacloban City, The Philippines. Entitled: Qualitative Approaches to Educational Evaluation, it was a cooperative venture between the College of Arts and Sciences at the Leyte Institute of Technology and the School of Education at Flinders University. A central purpose of…

Adolescence marks the beginning of a significant shift away from the world of parental support to the formation of intimate friendships with peers. Developmentally, this is an important time for adolescents as they seek to develop interpersonal skills, share activities and develop a deeper sense of understanding of themselves and others through…

A meta-analysis of 105 studies reporting 152 self-concept interventions in school settings was conducted. The aims of the study were twofold: to explore the construct validity approach to self-concept interventions, and to examine aspects of the administration of the interventions, namely treatment setting, administrator type, administrator…

Critical questions in educational psychology research to be addressed in this paper concern the casual relationship between academic self-concept, academic motivation and its effect on academic achievement. Do changes in academic self-concept and academic motivation lead to changes in subsequent academic achievement? Various studies have attempted…

This study formed the basis of an assignment for a teacher-training course. The objectives of the study were to define three scientific concepts and identify for each some of the misconceptions that students commonly have. Six students, representing three distinct age groups were interviewed, using a predetermined set of questions and activities…

This article reports an investigation into the factors that facilitate language learning. The first strand examines whether motivation is a predictor of as is widely accepted. In order to confirm this, Grade 10 students' motivation level was measured using two questions. Language gains were also measured and compared with the motivation level. The…

The importance of cultural elements in foreign language teaching has been widely accepted in recent years. This applies particularly to the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language (TCFL) to non-native Chinese speakers at tertiary level in mainland China. However, there is no commonly accepted blueprint that defines the parts of Chinese culture…

Using the Rasch Rating Scale model, data collected from 200 ninth grade students in North Sulawesi Indonesia were analysed. This analysis sought to validate instruments developed to measure the Democratic Climate of Civic Education Classrooms (DCCEC) and Student Engagement in Civic Education Classrooms (SECEC). Category used, item and person…

Although learner-centeredness has been widely applied in instruction in the world, this approach has only been cautiously adopted in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching at some institutions in Vietnam. Taking a social constructivist view, this case study explores how a learner-centred perspective is employed in EFL teaching at a teacher…

The aims of this paper are (a) to investigate how adolescents perceive and represent the body form with respect to being fat or thin, and (b) to describe the process of how they constructed the social representations for these latter two body conditions. The data were collected by means of individual and focus group interviews with adolescent…

In this study, we report results of a study examining the relationship between home environment factors and reading achievement in Zimbabwe. The study utilised data collected by the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ). The data were submitted to linear regression analysis through structural equation…

This article examines the interplay between school factors and teacher job satisfaction that influences educational outcomes by comparing two Non-governmental Organisation (NGO) schools in Cambodia. This small-scale qualitative case study was conducted over a period of eight weeks in 2005 in two NGO schools in a suburb of Phnom Penh. The findings…