Tongan students’ attitudes towards their subjects in new zealand relative to their academic achievement

Research indicates that affective attitudes such as liking of a subject and confidence in one’s ability within a subject predict academic performance. Generally, immigrant minority students have positive attitudes and often have low academic performance. This study examines the self-efficacy and liking of subjects of New Zealand students and analyses the relationship of those attitudes towards academic performance in mathematics, writing, and reading by self-reported ethnicity. Data were obtained from the norming samples from the Assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning project in New Zealand. Of special interest are the relationships between attitude and performance for Pasifika and Tongan students in New Zealand. Tongan and Pasifika students had positive attitudes, but their mean scores were not significantly different to other ethnic groups except in writing for Tongan students. Tongan and Pasifika students did have lower academic performance than majority and Asian immigrant students in all three subjects. The correlation between liking and self-efficacy was fundamentally zero for Tongan and Pasifika students, while it was weakly positive for majority and Asian immigrant students. Together these results question the power of self-efficacy and liking attitudes to predict academic performance for immigrant students from agrarian or traditional societies. Further, the data suggest that ‘school effects’ are most likely explanations for this relationship, rather than lack of attachment, opposition, or deficiency theories.     

Relation between reading problems and internalizing behavior in school for preadolescent children from economically disadvantaged families

This longitudinal study of 105 economically disadvantaged children examined the relation between reading problems and internalizing behavior in 3rd- and 5th-grade assessments (8- to 12-year olds). The variable-centered results showed that reading problems predicted change in internalizing behavior in the context of child and family predictors. The person-centered results showed that children with reading problems in both grades had higher internalizing scores in 5th grade but not in 3rd grade than children with reading problems in 3rd grade or no problems. Child-reported negative emotion experiences varied similarly across grade. The results tie reading problems to emotional distress in school and support conclusions about the direction of effects and the internalization of academic difficulty for disadvantaged children.     

Social working memory: Memory for another rat's spatial choices can increase or decrease choice tendencies

In two experiments using a radial-arm maze, pairs of rats made choices among eight maze locations, each containing a large quantity of one of two food types. The choices made by 1 rat affected the choices made by the other rat. Under most conditions, visits by 1 rat increased the tendency of the other rat to subsequently choose that maze location. However, the effect depended on the quality of the food available in a particular location. When it was possible for the rats to observe each other on the maze arms and a rat had experienced that a location contained the less preferred food type, a previous visit to that location by the foraging partner decreased the tendency to visit that location. These effects are attributed to working memory for the spatial choices of another rat, and they indicate that memory produced by a rat’s own visit to a maze location is integrated with memory for the behavior of another rat to determine spatial choice     

Priming urban learners' attitudes toward the relevancy of science: A mixed-methods study testing the importance of context

The development of three-dimensional learning among all K-12 student demographics remains a prominent goal for the field of science education. However, substantial research in science teacher education for urban populations showcases hurdles to overcome in order to achieve this goal, particularly for elementary teachers. Research shows that urban elementary teachers are often ill-prepared to develop a type of science pedagogy responsive to students' learning needs. The fidelity of such pedagogies that these teachers adhere to when trying to implement such a requested content–relationality between these populations and how their local contexts can be used as sites to learn science in relevant ways are often not fully realized, as well. Given that science achievement gaps exhibit racial disparities starting in primary grades and attitudes toward science have been shown to affect academic achievement and motivation, we argue that one way to ameliorate, in at least an incremental way, this disparity is to design novel learning experiences to prime students to see the relevancy of science in their local contexts before such three-dimensional designed learning is set to occur. In this research, we leveraged the immersive nature of Virtual Reality 360 videos and present a design-based research iteration testing how this novel technologically enhanced learning experience may have influenced close to 400 urban elementary students' attitudes toward science around those attitudes labeled as “behavioral beliefs” by the field. Using a concurrent, convergent mixed-methods design with a two-way multivariate analysis of covariance quantitative data set triangulated with students' qualitative self-reports that were transformed into quantitative preponderances in graphic form, the data support that our design iteration emphasizing the importance of context as a design focus can prime students who struggle to see science as relevant to change their attitudes. Implications are discussed around relationality, novel technological affordances, and the use of local contexts as learning resources.     

Value Profiles During Middle Childhood: Developmental Processes and Social Behavior

Little is known about how children's value priorities develop over time. This study identifies children's value priority profiles and follows their development during middle childhood. Australian children (N = 609; ages 5–12 at Time 1) reported their values over 2 years. Latent Transition Analysis indicated four profiles: Social-Focus, Self-Focus, Growth-Focus and Undifferentiated. Within person development was characterized by profile stability or transfer to the Social-Focus profile. Younger children were more likely to have an Undifferentiated profile (or Self-Focus among boys) than older ones. Girls were more likely to have a Social-Focus profile or transfer to it, and less likely to have a Self- or Growth-Focus profile than boys. Social-Focus profile membership over time predicted more prosocial and less aggressive behavior.     

CHE Principles: facilitating authentic and dialogical semi-structured interviews in educational research

This paper examines the values of the CHE principles of Connectivity, Humanness and Empathy as a guiding framework for maximizing the ethical and methodological advantages of semi-structured interview research practices. The authors draw from two separate educational studies and apply the CHE principles to analyse and evaluate the effectiveness of decision-making in facilitating sustainable relationships with the participants in each study. Findings highlight that dialogical relations with participants were evident in both studies, and identify significant junctures where decision-making and actions influenced effective rapport-building and respectful and reciprocal relationships with participants in the research. The CHE principles emerge as providing a robust framework for educational researchers to employ when auditing their decision-making prior to and during their engagement in qualitative interviews.     

Students’ perceptions of vocabulary knowledge and learning in a middle school science classroom

This study investigated eighth-grade science students’ (13–14-year-olds) perceptions of their vocabulary knowledge, learning, and content achievement. Data sources included pre- and posttest of students’ perceptions of vocabulary knowledge, students’ perceptions of vocabulary and reading strategies surveys, and a content achievement test. Students’ perceptions of vocabulary knowledge were compared before and after instruction to see whether students believed they gained knowledge and the ability to explain categories of technical science terms. Students’ perceptions of vocabulary knowledge increased as a result of instruction. The participants had favorable views of the vocabulary and reading strategies implemented and believed the literacy approaches were important for their developing science knowledge. In addition, students’ content achievement was compared to a national data set. Students in this study outperformed a national data set on all content knowledge items assessed. Students’ perceptions of their knowledge and vocabulary and reading strategies were congruent with their content achievement. This study is one of the first to highlight the pivotal role students’ perception of vocabulary knowledge and vocabulary and reading strategies plays in science content learning.     

Medical students' attitudes toward the anatomy dissection room in relation to personality

Assessment of the personalities of medical students could enable medical educators to formulate strategies for the best development of academic and clinical competencies. In this article, we focus on the experience of students in the anatomy dissecting room. While there have been many attempts to evaluate the emotional responses of medical students to human cadaveric dissection, there has been no investigation into how different personality traits affect the responses. The main hypothesis tested was that there is a relationship between personality traits and attitudes toward the dissection room. For the present study, a group of French medical students (n = 403; mean age 21.3 ± 1.6; 65.3% female) completed a "Big Five" personality inventory and a questionnaire to assess their attitudes in regard to human dissection. The findings are consistent with our hypothesis, in that we found a relationship between reporting anxiety and four of the "Big Five" dimensions (all except openness). The rated level of anxiety was positively correlated with negative affectivity, more strongly at the beginning than at the end of the course. There were significant gender differences in attitudes toward dissection. The findings are discussed in relation to the possibility of preparing students for the dissecting room experience and also in relation to the students' understanding of mortality issues.     

Factors influencing early adolescents’ mathematics achievement: High-quality teaching rather than relationships

This study used data from the Assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning project, which involved data on the academic performance of more than 90,000 New Zealand students in six subjects (i.e. reading, writing and mathematics in two languages). Two sub-samples of this dataset were included for detailed re-analysis to test the general applicability of the Australian model of Quality of School Life (Ainley et al. 1986) in the New Zealand context. The first sample comprised 336 year 8 students from elementary schools and the second sample consisted of 272 year 10 students from high schools. Furthermore, two structural equation models were developed and tested, expressing relationships between students’ quality of school life perceptions, students’ attitudes to mathematics, and their effects on mathematics achievement. The quality of school life questionnaires scales [Ainley and Bourke, in Res Pap Educ 7(2):107–128, 1992] were used as indicators of students’ perceptions regarding learning, teachers and peer relationships. The model proposed that perceived quality of school life would affect students’ attitudes of liking and confidence in mathematics, which would in turn affect their academic performance. After controlling for other variables in the model, students’ perception about their self-efficacy to learn mathematics was more directly related to outcomes than to perceptions of teacher quality or peer involvement. Data analyses revealed no apparent relationships of these factors to mathematics achievement. Moreover, results for both samples led to the conclusion that the perceived quality of learning is connected with ‘confidence in’ and ‘liking mathematics’, which in turn predict students’ mathematics achievement.