In this response, the authors dispel interpretation of their critical review of research on performance-approach goals as support for a dichotomous perspective of achievement goal theory. Challenges the suggestion that accepting recent research findings and adopting a multiple goals perspective constitutes a theoretical revision of the assumption…

An instructional program focused on story theme was administered to 2nd and 3rd graders in a high-poverty school. Compared with traditional instruction, the program improved theme comprehension and identification of instructed themes in new stories. However, the program did not help students apply a theme to real-life situations or identify and…

Describes development and validation of a new self-report instrument, the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory, designed to assess adolescent and adult readers' metacognitive awareness and perceived use of reading strategies while reading academic materials. After a brief review of the literature, the development and validation…

History teachers and their 11th-grade students rated the relative importance of sections of instructional text on which teachers would be giving a test. Multilevel analysis revealed only a moderate correspondence between teachers in importance ratings. This suggested there were large differences between task demands of individual teachers,…

Two large studies identified substantial numbers of German-speaking children with marked dissociations between reading and spelling difficulties. Dysfluent reading in the absence of spelling difficulties was associated only with a naming speed deficit-assessed at school entrance-but not with phonological memory or phonological awareness deficits.…

Causal modeling was used to examine how primary students' language ability interacted with pace and redundancy of instructional language during an expository science lesson to explain students' attention and learning. Language ability and pace, mediated by students' attention to the lesson, accounted for variance in learning outcomes. Higher…

Examined the effects of both general and task-specific writing experiences on college students' writing-skill development. As predicted, repeated practice was associated with superior writing skills and after controlling for repeated practice, writing within a specific test domain was associated with superior writing skills. Implications for…

Contrary to assumptions about aversive effects of competition on achievement motivation, in this study young people saw academic contests as fair. When participants completed structural interviews on fair ways to organize science contests and on differentiation of skill and luck, age-related trends in their conceptions of procedural justice were…

Four experiments with 4th, 5th, and 6th graders addressed conceptual change in response to anomalous data about empirical regularities in science. Impedance to conceptual change in response to anomalous data could potentially occur at any of four cognitive processes: observation, interpretation, generalization, or retention. In the four…

In a longitudinal study of 496 students in 27 self-contained German elementary school classrooms, performance in mathematical word problems and arithmetic tasks was measured at the end of Grades 2 and 3. Findings show that a cognitive constructivist orientation was associated with larger achievement gains in mathematical word problems. (Author)

This investigation explored teachers' use and effectiveness of a comparison routine to help students understand comparisons of important content information in secondary content classes containing students of diverse ability. Use of the routine led to significantly better retention and expression of information by students in the experimental…

Focuses on the motivating styles teachers adopt in home school and public school contexts. Results showed that religiously motivated home educators embraced a relatively more controlling style than did public school teachers. Results illuminate ideological roots underlying teachers' motivating styles and highlight the need for home school…

This research comprised three studies (two prospective and one short-term longitudinal) designed to investigate mastery, performance-approach, and performance-avoidance goals as predictors of achievement-relevant processes prior to the undergraduate examination experience. Results from across the three studies were supportive of hypotheses and…

There is disagreement over whether girls or boys are at risk in the context of school. Girls outperform boys in school, particularly in stereotypically feminine subjects. However, girls are also more vulnerable to internal distress than boys are. The aim of this research was to understand this pattern of gender differences. (Author)

This study examined the effects of similarity in competence between model and observer on the effectiveness of observational learning in argumentative writing. Results are consistent with the similarity hypothesis: weak learners learn more from focusing their observations on weak models, whereas better learners learn more from focusing on good…