Trajectories from academic intrinsic motivation to need for cognition and educational attainment

This long-term longitudinal study addressed the theoretical underpinning of academic intrinsic motivation (AIM) from childhood through adolescence, to need for cognition (NFC) and educational attainment (EA) during adulthood. AIM was measured from 9 to 17 years old, NFC and EA at 29 years old, and IQ at 8 years old. Latent change and growth mixture modeling were utilized. These models complemented each other, revealing that initial motivational status significantly related to both outcomes. Growth mixture modeling elaborated the findings by identifying distinctive subgroups in initial status and developmental change. In contrast to children with initially higher AIM, those starting lower declined resulting in lower NFC and EA. IQ was controlled in these analyses. Findings enhance understanding of trajectories across two decades of development, indicating that students’ early motivation relates to adulthood NFC and EA. Implications for educational practices are discussed.     

Teachers' perceptions of national identity and its intersection with gender: a phenomenological study in a conflict society

The aim of this study is to investigate Greek-Cypriot teachers' perceptions regarding the role that national identity and its intersection with gender play in representations of the past. Drawing on data deriving from forty individual interviews and analysed through the lens of intersectionality theory, it is shown that: although all teachers were able to recognise the role of national identity in representations of the past in the Cyprus conflict, the majority of these teachers were not equally aware of the gender politics in representations of the past. The participants seemed to be willing to take responsibility for the ways in which they represented the national identity, but they were not willing to assume responsibility for their gendered representations; instead, these representations were deemed ‘unconscious’ or a ‘product of tradition’ or the ‘natural order’ and, thus, not within their control. The paper ends with a discussion of how this study informs educational research and teacher professional development, concerning the intersection of national identity and gender in relation to issues of collective memory.     

Empirical Research on Ethnic Minority Students: 1995–2009

Ethnic minority disproportionality has been a topic of extensive discussion and research for many years. In 1997, Artiles, Trent, and Kuan conducted a seminal review of the special education research literature to identify how often researchers report and disaggregate data in ways that would support conclusions about specific ethnic minority groups. These authors found alarmingly low rates of publication on identifiable minority groups. The purpose of this review is to replicate the work of Artiles et al. and extend this literature analysis to the subsequent 15‐year period (1995–2009). We found increases in the proportion of articles reporting ethnic minority information 15 years following the Artiles et al. publication. Discussion focuses on the gap in our knowledge of evidence‐based practices for ethnic minority students in special education.     

Preschool Self-Regulation and Preacademic Skills as Mediators of the Long-Term Impacts of an Early Intervention

This study explores children's early academic and self-regulatory skills as potential pathways through which a preschool enrichment program—the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP)—may contribute to low-income children's long-term outcomes (N = 466; M_age at baseline = 4.10 years). We find that CSRP's impact on high school grades may be partially explained by early gains in vocabulary and math skills. Although impacts on high school executive function (EF) were more equivocal, our results suggest that early improvements in math skills attributable to the intervention may, in turn, predict long-term gains in EF skills. These results complement the existing literature on preschool fade out, while also shedding light on the cross-domain relations between academic and self-regulatory skills.     

Using the Sociology of Associations to Rethink STEM Education

Using three constructs taken from Latour's 2005 book, Reassembling the Social, we consider our work in 2 contexts that were part of a project to support science teachers working with English learners: an 8th-grade physical science class in a summer science enrichment academy, and a 6th-grade Earth science class in a public middle school. We utilize Latour's constructs of (a) group formation, (b) mediators and intermediaries, and (c) traces of intentionality to interpret the interactions that occur in these spaces. We analyze these interactions to make a broader argument about the limitations of improvement science perspectives that are increasingly influential in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education research in the U.S. context.     

Academic pressures and the black adolescent

This study examined the relationships among social class, race, and academic pressure in an inner city public high school. Previous research outside the inner city on U.S. and English high school students, who were predominantly white, has yielded four major factors: parental stress, peer stress, importance of school, and fear of failure. The primary purposes of this study are (1) to measure academic stress in an inner city setting, (2) to observe differences and similarities between blacks and whites and between middle- and lower-class adolescents, and (3) to determine if the four previously observed factors would be as pertinent for this sample as they were for previous samples. Race differences were observed on 4 of 10 factors with blacks indicating significantly more pressure than whites. A race by class interaction was observed on one factor and no significant differences were observed on the five remaining factors.     

The adjustment of goldfish to reduction in magnitude of reward in massed trials

For a group of goldfish trained in a runway under conditions of highly massed practice, reduction in magnitude of reward produced a gradual decline in performance to the level of a small-reward control group but no suggestion of negative successive contrast. These results are consistent with the suggestion that reward plays a somewhat different role in the learning of fish and rats. They also serve to extend the range of conditions under which the stimulus aftereffects of reward come to control the instrumental behavior of fish.     

An Initial Evaluation of the Comprehensive Quality of Life Scale‐‐Intellectual Disability

This paper introduces a new scale to measure the life quality of people with an intellectual disability. The Comprehensive Quality of Life Scale‐‐Intellectual Disability incorporates features that reflect contemporary understanding of the quality of life construct and exists in a parallel form for the general population. Psychometric data are presented and comparisons are made between data collected from 59 people with an intellectual disability, the vicarious responses of each respondent's primary caregiver, and 69 university students. It is concluded that the scale represents a useful instrument to measure comparative life quality.     

Spanish and English Early Literacy Profiles of Preschool Latino English Language Learner Children

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to examine within-group individual differences in the code-related and oral language abilities of an economically stressed Spanish-speaking English language learner (ELL) preschool sample and to evaluate the predictive relationship of these differences to later listening comprehension. Latent class analysis was used to identify similarities in both the latent and outcome variables to form classes of students with similar profiles on the measured variables. Our 1st finding confirmed the existence of 4 distinct psychometrically validated profiles: (a) Low English Language, Average Spanish Language, Mixed Spanish Code-Related (prevalence 19.4%); (b) Average English Language, Strengths in Spanish Language and Spanish Code-Related (24.2%); (c) Mixed English and Spanish Language, Low Spanish Code-Related (prevalence 34%); and (d) High English Language, Average Spanish Language, Mixed Spanish Code-Related (prevalence 22%). The resulting profiles demonstrated that English and Spanish code- and language-related domains of emergent literacy developed unevenly across the Spanish-speaking ELL preschoolers. Relative strengths and weaknesses in code- and language-related skills were also found to be meaningfully related to end-of-year listening comprehension—a precursor to reading comprehension. Finally, profiles yielded meaningful variability along sociodemographic variables. Practice or Policy: Implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.