Research on teachers' judgments of student performance has demonstrated that educational assessments may be biased or may more correctly take the achievements of students into account depending on teachers' motivations while making the judgment. Building on research on social judgment formation the present investigation examined whether the…

The present study tested the model minority and inferior minority assumptions by examining the relationship between academic performance and measures of behavioral health in a subsample of 3,008 (22%) participants in a nationally representative, multicultural sample of 13,601 students in the 2001 Youth Risk Behavioral Survey, comparing Asian…

Previous studies suggest that social relations can increase one's motivation to learn in school. However, other evidence showed that having more friends may also distract from one's academic involvement. To understand the mechanisms behind this apparent contradiction, this study identified and tested the effects of a potentially important positive…

In Germany, Turkish students are overrepresented on lowest school tracks. Research has provided evidence that stereotypical expectations can color judgments. We experimentally investigated whether student information that strongly confirmed or disconfirmed Turkish stereotypical expectations led to student teachers' judgments that were biased…

In this study, we examine students' educational attitudes upon the transition to Dutch senior vocational education (SVE), a transition associated with high dropout rates in the first year. Prior studies have identified differences in educational attitudes between sociodemographic groups. However, the mechanisms underlying those differences remain…

The purpose of the present study was both to extend the performance optimality hypothesis of action identification theory to the realm of education and to examine the indirect role of action identification levels and action maintenance difficulty on the relationship between initial and final performance. Results demonstrated that students' final…

Our aim is to shed more light on university students' sources of attitudes towards the market economy, social inequality, and the responsibilities of the state. Analyzing survey data of almost 500 students at a German university, we identify those sources the subjects report to be important in the process of forming their politico-economic…

Students in class are sometimes torn between following the lesson and engaging in off-task behavior. In this paper, instead of classifying it as a form of deviant behavior, off-task behavior is reconstructed as a manifestation of students multiple motivations in the classroom. The study examines whether parental monitoring, peer value…

We documented what parents report as the cause of their child's academic and conduct setbacks and what they say they do in response. We recruited an opportunity sample of 479 parents and narrowed our sample to parents of children without disabilities between the ages of 5-18 (N = 312). Parents responded to open-ended questions, and we coded…

This essay compares two curricular treatments of the Holocaust, one that resulted from a full-semester, 10th grade elective course taught at a public high school, the second constructed through a quarter-long, 8th grade unit taught at a charismatic, evangelical, fundamentalist Christian private school. In brief, the study examines the Holocaust's…

This study reports the impact of consistently using a Socratic Seminar to interpret historical documents written by women on 9th grade students' historical empathy. Over the course of one semester in a year-long world history course, the class examined three documents written by women living in the complex time period being studied and discussed…

As the number of elderly people in our society increases, it becomes especially important for children to develop positive attitudes towards elders and towards their own aging. The American Association for Health Education has recommended the infusion of positive aging concepts in the K-12 curriculum. This qualitative study investigated the…

This study investigated the degree to which beliefs about democratic theory and practice taught in a social studies methods course would persist after the transition to in-service teaching. The 27 participants were pre-service teachers at initial data collection and first-year in-service teachers at final data collection. Data were collected…

Through surveys, interviews, observations, and field notes, I examined the beliefs and practices of six high school world history teachers regarding the use of digital primary sources and the potential added value of formal training in technology as a tool for instruction. Access to equipment (namely computer projectors and school computing…

This paper argues for civic education that helps students recognize that reasonable people will disagree about the best ways to live, and that this recognition should frequently impel us toward compromise and accommodation in the public square. Fostering this virtue of reasonable disagreement will require a concerted curricular effort toward…