Background: Individuals pursue teaching careers for numerous reasons, such as for instrumental or prosocial purposes. Aims: This study examined the personal (instrumental motivation) and social (prosocial motivation) utility of teaching as predictors of teaching quality in terms of clarity of instruction, classroom management, and cognitive…

More needs to be known about the benefits and risks to the development of interpersonal and intrapersonal skills in ubiquitous digital environments at school and at home. Nine to 12-year-old students (n = 186) in a 1:1 digital programme serving low SES and culturally diverse communities rated their self-regulation and social skills for both…

Background: Although emotion is central to most models of children's well-being, few studies have looked at how well-being is related to the ways in which children regulate their emotions. Aims: The aim of this study was to examine the associations among children's emotion regulation strategy choice and their emotional expression, behaviour, and…

Background: There is substantial evidence indicating that various psychological processes are affected by cultural context, but such research is comparatively nascent within New Zealand. As there are four large cultural groups in New Zealand, representing an intersection of individualist, collectivist, indigenous, colonial, and immigrant cultures,…

Background: Individual student characteristics such as competence motivation, achievement values, and goal orientations have been related in meaningful ways to task attainment. The standards-based National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) was developed in New Zealand with the intention of strengthening connections between student…

Background: Research into teacher expectations has shown that these have an effect on student achievement. Some researchers have explored the impact of various student characteristics on teachers' expectations. One attribute of interest is ethnicity. Aims: This study aimed to explore differences in teachers' expectations and judgments of student…

A study of five ethnically mixed elementary New Zealand classrooms showed that, while teacher expectations did not severely bias children's learning, negative perceptions and expectations for Polynesian children led to them being treated similarly to others of low ability and helped to maintain the status quo of lower achievement. (Author/RM)

A study of 90 nine year olds in five ethnically mixed New Zealand classrooms indicated that teachers perceived Polynesian pupils less favorably than White students on dimensions reflecting parent/home factors and academic work skills. Observations of teacher pupil interaction, however, showed no ethnic differences. (Author/GC)

Analyzes data from a longitudinal investigation of reading ability in New Zealand children, ages 7-13. Children with lower reading abilities at age 13 were compared with children who were slow starters but had normal reading abilities at age 13 in an effort to identify predictors of reading progress. (22 references) (Author/LRW)