The authors examined whether relevance instructions compensate for differences in verbal ability on measures of reading time, text recall, and sentence recognition. College students (n = 81) with higher and lower verbal ability were assigned randomly to 1 of 2 relevance-instruction conditions before reading a text. They asked participants in each…

Few researchers have considered the influence of school context, an important construct at earlier ages, on late adolescents' college adjustment. In a sample of second-semester freshmen (N = 266), the authors explored associations between a sense of school belonging and academic and psychological adjustment. Students' reports of belonging at the…

The goal of this study was to validate measures and assess the effects of collaborative group-learning methods in real classrooms on 3 specific dependent variables: feelings of campus connectedness, academic classroom community, and effective group processing (2 factors). Confirmatory factor analysis were conducted to evaluate a 4-factor model.…

Examination performance of introductory psychology students (n=576) was significantly enhanced in each of 4 separate comparisons of those taking tests with a partner versus traditional solo testing. Found positive effects in both assigned and freely chosen teams. (SLD)

Explored the contributions of subject matter knowledge, strategic processing, and interest to college students' educational psychology learning. In general, results for 77 undergraduates uphold the predictions of the model of domain learning (P. Alexander, 1997). Students' subject-matter knowledge, strategic processing, interest, and interactive…

Compared multimodal instruction with text and pictures with unimodal text-only instruction as 44 college students used a visual or textual manual to learn a complex software application. Results initially support dual coding theory and indicate that multimodal instruction led to better performance than unimodal instruction. (SLD)

Studied the effect of a communication designed to enhance the self-efficacy beliefs of introductory psychology students. Neutral e-mail messages of messages designed to enhance self-efficacy were sent to 76 college students. Results show that self-efficacy beliefs were related to examination scores and were significantly affected by the…

Studied college students' organization of concepts related to emotions and their regulation during test taking and whether students with test anxiety have a different conceptual organization about test taking. Results with 78 and 76 students show that for students with low and moderate test anxiety, the organizational scheme for the selected…

Investigated whether two editorial policies concerning the reporting of statistical information would affect readers' perceptions of research results in 4 experiments involving 194, 89, 78, and 69 undergraduate and graduate students. Results show that undergraduates were more likely to perceive research to be important when effect sizes were…

Studied the effect of self-regulatory processes on test preparation and performance through interviews with 62 college students. As expected, high test scorers used more self-regulatory processes to enhance test preparation and performance, and self-regulation positively affected test performance. (SLD)

Analyzed the effects of different types of maps and considerate (following the scanning pattern of the map) and inconsiderate (not following the map's scanning pattern) text on retention of information. Results from 2 experiments involving 337 college students show that the type of map and text may affect recall of information, but do not support…

Compared response rates, response time, and costs of mail and electronic surveys using a sample of 377 college faculty members. Mail surveys yielded a higher response rate and a lower rate of undeliverable surveys, but response time was longer and costs were higher than for electronic surveys. (SLD)

Studied the relationship between knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition and how they interact to mediate the effects of social cues on confidence judgments using a sample of 77 Japanese undergraduates. Discusses the ways in which social cues affected confidence judgments as a function of regulatory ability. (SLD)

Studied bilingual knowledge maps (BiK-maps) as tools for learning German-English word pairs. Results for 72 undergraduates indicate that BiK-map learners outperformed list learners on all dependent measures. Semantic emphasis negatively affected performance over time. (SLD)

Studied attentional effects of animation on the processing of information from node-link maps and text by randomly assigning 40 college students to static node-link map presentation, 40 to animated node-link presentation, 29 to static text presentation, and 27 to animated text presentation. Participants recalled more main-idea information from…