Language and literacy skills are instrumental to success at school and early success with writing is a key factor in literacy development. By eight years of age, children spend up to half of their school day engaged in writing tasks suggesting that those who find learning to write difficult may be disadvantaged. The ability to hear and record…

Developing sustainable e-learning requires a better understanding of the perceptions and preferences of e-learning providers and e-learners on the four crucial dimensions for elearning success including pedagogies, technologies, learning resources and management of learning resources. There is, however, little research on evaluating whether these…

Among the factors influencing learners' learning, instrumental motivation, critical thinking and autonomy are thought to be of crucial importance. The present study, thus, set out to investigate relationships between instrumental motivation, critical thinking, autonomy and academic achievement of Iranian EFL learners. To this end, 100 Iranian…

There are many different ways to measure a construct and the method chosen to accomplish this task can have a major effect on results of statistical analyses based on the measured variable. We looked at various methods ranging between naive and sophisticated that can be used to measure self-efficacy within the special context of mathematics, in…

This paper documents the initial phase of a research project to improve peer interaction in a discussion forum for a Spatial Sciences class (unit) at Curtin University. A number of strategies were implemented to redress the low levels of online participation prevailing for a number of years. Three research questions were formulated to evaluate the…

Efforts to increase teacher quality have focused on increasing both the admission and graduation standards required for students entering the profession. This study examined the relationship between common standards, such as college GPA, ACT scores, and Praxis exam scores, with student teacher performance as measured by an assessment rubric based…

This paper presents results from a longitudinal study of sojourner students which was conducted at an international university in Germany from 2004 to 2007. The study followed a cohort of undergraduate students from the first week of their studies to their graduation. Participants completed three questionnaires: the Portrait Value Questionnaire…

There is growing literature in the area of medical students' quality of life. As far as we know, no qualitative studies have investigated the links between students' quality of life issues and their motivation to learn. The key question that drove the present study was: Is there a correlation between students' quality of life and their motivation…

This study explores what motivates a student to enter medical school by first measuring students' strength of motivation and then by looking for relationships between motivation and career-related values and approaches to learning. Validated and reliable questionnaires were used to obtain data. This study found no differences in strength of…

Practicing teachers and principals in selected Government schools in Victoria provided data on their levels of emotional intelligence and teacher efficacy beliefs. The data supported the theoretical expectation of a linkage between emotional intelligence and teacher self efficacy. Regression analyses showed that neither gender nor age moderated…

In this study we examined the relationship between children's social skills and bullying behaviours. Teachers rated social skills and indirect and direct physical bullying behaviours of 120 students in elementary school. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that social skills are inversely related to both direct physical bullying (beta =…

The concept of self-efficacy is based on the triadic reciprocality model symbolising a relationship between: (a) personal factors i.e. cognition, emotion, and biological events (b) behaviour, and (c) environmental factors (Maddux, 1995). Cognition, emotion and behaviour are the domains of personality which form the basis of research in…

Further evidence is presented to demonstrate the validity of a new measure of emotional intelligence: Reactions to Teaching Situations (RTS). Using criterion-related groups of high and low scorers on the RTS, it is shown that high scorers give more responses coded as emotional intelligence in their answers to sentence completion tasks relating to…