Clarifying mastery-avoidance goals in high school: Distinguishing between intrapersonal and task-based standards of competence

The definition, measurement, prevalence, and relations of mastery-avoidance goals with engagement outcomes are still under debate. Study 1 (n = 256) aimed to investigate these issues among junior high and high school students in two domains. Findings indicated that students distinguished between the three commonly assessed achievement goals and mastery-avoidance goals. Moreover, students distinguished between the two standards conceived to underlie mastery-avoidance goals—task-mastery and intrapersonal competence. However, the task-mastery items failed to show reliability. Study 2 (n = 118) aimed to replicate the results of Study 1 as well as to investigate the associations of mastery-avoidance goals with self-regulation strategies and affect in school. Intrapersonal mastery-avoidance goals were positively related to adaptive strategies and negatively with maladaptive strategies. Moreover, when combined with mastery-approach goals, intrapersonal mastery-avoidance goals enhanced students’ reports of adaptive affect in school. The implications of these findings to theory, method, and future directions are discussed.     

Harnessing technology to improve formative assessment of student conceptions in STEM: forging a national network

Concept inventories, consisting of multiple-choice questions designed around common student misconceptions, are designed to reveal student thinking. However, students often have complex, heterogeneous ideas about scientific concepts. Constructed-response assessments, in which students must create their own answer, may better reveal students' thinking, but are time- and resource-intensive to evaluate. This report describes the initial meeting of a National Science Foundation-funded cross-institutional collaboration of interdisciplinary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education researchers interested in exploring the use of automated text analysis to evaluate constructed-response assessments. Participants at the meeting shared existing work on lexical analysis and concept inventories, participated in technology demonstrations and workshops, and discussed research goals. We are seeking interested collaborators to join our research community.     

Clarifying Metacognition, Self-Regulation, and Self-Regulated Learning: What’s the Purpose?

In this commentary on the special issue, I join the authors in searching for a conceptual framework that would clarify the concepts of metacognition, self-regulation, and self-regulated learning. Building on the insights of the different articles, I suggest that metacognition, self-regulation, and self-regulated learning should be considered as subtypes of the general, abstract, phenomenon of self-regulated action. I continue by questioning the benefit of seeking boundaries between these three concepts. Instead, I propose to search for dimensions along which types of self-regulated action vary. I, then, introduce the notion of a “multidimensional conceptual space of self-regulated action” as a conceptual tool that allows for diversity of conceptions of self-regulated action while maintaining conceptual clarity. I conclude by highlighting the central role of purpose of engagement in self-regulated action and by noting its potential for guiding the search for meaningful dimensions on which to typify self-regulation.     

A further contribution to the modelling of multi-waveform generators

A method has been presented in recent papers for deriving precisely stabilized waveform generators by relating them to second-order conservative oscillators. The present paper suggests a method for considerably generalizing the previous class ofgenerator models. This should enable the development of a larger variety of waveform generators with ease and flexibility. The new method is analyzed and is shown to possess implications to theoretical biology and other fields.     

Experimental university classes and “the best that has been thought”

In the latest in a series of articles on experimental courses at Kent State University, the authors study how students perceive such classes in terms of a liberal arts cultural education versus a values oriented education. The results determine that subject matter interest was the prime motivation for students to enroll in experimental classes. The results also suggest an openness and variety of student interest that seems unaware of a liberal arts core of the best that has been thought.