Doctor of Philosophy / The main aim of this research is the exploration of relationships and correlations between thinking styles of student designers, their personal aptitudes, and design education. It involves discovering the role/s several groups of learning styles and cognitive abilities may play in problem solving during administered design tasks; and the influence they may have on academic performance and quality of produced design solutions. The main hypothesis is that differences in designers’ individual problem solving strategies and, ultimately, products of their expertise – designed artefacts – can be correlated with the differences in their learning styles and cognitive abilities. We suggest the following. (a) Designers with different styles adopt different approaches to design situations and use different strategies during problem solving. It is possible to find the supporting evidence by investigating their performance on design tasks. (b) Individual differences in design reasoning and problem solving could be correlated with the differences in individual cognitive abilities. (c) It may be possible to find correlations between cognitive styles and cognitive abilities. (d) It is likely that a number of visible or measurable qualities of students’ design drawings, would in some way reflect different characteristics of the above individual styles and abilities. The methodological approach draws on theoretical and empirical knowledge from several domains, including: design studies, psychology, cognitive science and study of creativity. This study is concerned with selecting and substantiating the input – a number of cognitive styles and abilities chosen for evaluation; and their subsequent assessment. It involves administering design sessions and exploring them as a process to see whether and how the above abilities and styles are reflected in problem solving. It also deals with the assessment of the product i.e. produced design solutions, and their relation to the academic performance reports. And, finally, it explores correlations between the input, the process and the product to help finding explanations for the students’ preferences in adopting particular problem solving strategies in designing. This study is based upon the analysis of six major datasets from (1) an electronic test assessing individual positions on four dimensions (two dichotomies) of learning styles; (2) tests of cognitive abilities chosen on the basis of their relevance to designing; (3) design sessions, administered individually under retrospective protocol guidelines; (4) questionnaires, containing summaries of design sessions, and introspective reports of imagery use and problem-solving styles and strategies; (5) judgements of academic performance from course supervisors based on marks and grades; and (6) assessments of design drawings by professional architects. The analysis revealed fundamentally different ways by which students approach design situations; they are positively correlated with their learning styles. Students’ approaches to problem situations change with the task and within the task. However, eighty percent of the first year and half of the final year subjects showed various degrees of inflexibility in dealing with design problems; this may have decreased the quality of performance. Learning styles proved important in predicting the process and the outcome of problem solving. They may account for moderate to low quality of design solutions in cases with either style (from both dichotomies explored) being of low development. Styles were also observed to may have a moderate to strong influence on the students’ academic performance. Correlations between the measured cognitive abilities and academic performance were moderate to significant for the first year and similar but marginally lower for the final year students. At the same time, final year students scored higher on the ability tests and showed better results on the learning styles assessments. One of the likely reasons for this is the enhancement of abilities and styles during the course of study. No significant linear correlations between preferred learning styles and most of the measured cognitive abilities have been observed. The probable inference is that abilities are among many other factors affecting the development of learning styles. It has been, however, possible to establish a number of important correlations between the measurements of learning styles, cognitive abilities, observed problem solving behaviour, and students’ design solutions. Overall, it has been demonstrated that the applied methodology, although requiring further refinement, does enable examining and elucidating the influence of learning styles and cognitive abilities on design problem solving and academic performance.

The study aims to understand the status of concentration on extracurricular reading and the academic performance of junior high school students. The purposes are: 1. to know the status of concentration on extracurricular reading; 2. to analyze the difference of the variable between the factors of concentration on extracurricular reading and the academic performance; 3. to explore the relationship between concentration on extracurricular reading and the academic performance. Surveys were given to junior high school students at the 1th,2th and 3th grade respectively in the public schools of Kaohsiung; total 300 students have replied to the questionnaires from nine classes. Analysis of variance was applied to understand the internal factors, such as their motivation, interest and attitude upon concentrating on extracurricular reading and the external factors, such as attitude of parents and teachers as well as school promotion. How students concentrated on extracurricular reading and its relationship with the academic performance was explored. The conclusions were described as follows: I. Overall analysis of the current conditions shows that junior high school students have medium involvement in extra-curricular reading; their academic achievements are in the upper medium level. II. In terms of involvement in extra-curricular reading, female junior high school students outperform male junior high school students in their overall involvement in extra-curricular reading. Due to differences in the father¡¦s and mother¡¦s education levels and the mother¡¦s employment type, there are differences in perception, and perceptions are higher for junior high school students from middle-class families than from lower middle-class families. III. In terms of academic achievement, female junior high school students have greater perceptions for overall academic achievement than male junior high school students. Due to differences in the father¡¦s and mother¡¦s education levels and the parents¡¦ employment type, there are differences in perception, and perceptions are higher for junior high school students from middle-class families than from lower middle-class families. IV. Reading motivation, reading interest, parental attitudes, school promotions, reading attitudes, the degree of involvement in reading, reading achievements, and overall involvement in extra-curricular reading all have a significant effect on the overall academic achievement of junior high school students The conclusions can be used as reference for educational administration units, schools, teachers, parents and future researchers.

In the pre-Internet age, people desired remote education upon graduation from school or college usually took courses through in-class, radio, TV or postal correspondence. However, it now seems relevant to include the Internet in educational research because the computer network medium is now widely applied to, and available in, many walks of life. The purpose of this research is to apply computer technology towards distance learning, bolstering conventional teaching methods as well as stimulating students¡¦ motivation, and increasing the chance of success in their studies. This sample is taken from the 2nd grade 72 students in Chung Hwa School of Arts, and it is mainly focused on their chromatic study. Students answered two survey questions, one before and one after the experiment. The research approach was to examine differences between two survey answers in regards to both learning satisfaction and academic performance. There are conclusions after analyzing the survey answers. 1. Academic performance of students participating in the distance-learning courses was found to be superior. 2. The majority of the visual arts students were positive toward the combination of in-class learning and distance-learning. Apart from the above two conclusions, the suggestion to teachers, parents, and the Art Education Bureau is that distance learning might be useful in popularizing art education.

Abstract The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship among the teachers¡¦ leadership styles, the students¡¦ learning motivation and the students¡¦ academic performance. The subjects were 5th and 6th graders chosen from six classes. The Teacher¡¦s Transactional and Transformational Leadership Style Inventory, and The Student¡¦s Achievement Motive Inventory were employed as the instruments. The data was analyzed by using descriptive statistics, t-test, one-way ANOVA and Person Correlation. Five major conclusions were listed below¡G 1.The female students¡¦ learning motivation is higher than the male¡¦s. However,there is no significant gender difference on academic performance. For Transactional Leadership, teachers¡¦ active managentment by exception, passive managentment by exception, contingent reward were shown in the study, especially active managentment by exception. For Transformational Leadership, teachers¡¦ intellectual stimulation, charisma, individualized consideration, inspiration were exhibited in the study, especially charisma and intellectual stimulation. 2.For Transactional Leadership,"Contingent reward" shows middle correlation with students¡¦ learning motivation, while passive management by exception exhibits negavite correlation with students¡¦ learning motivation. For Transformational Leadership, inspiration, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration, charisma all exhibit middle positive correlation with learning motivation. 3.Teachers¡¦ leadership style was negatively and significantly associated with the students¡¦ academic performance for 5th and 6th graders . 4.Learning motivation was negatively and significantly associated with academic performance for 5th and 6th graders. 5.Except Transactional Leadership¡¦s passive administration, Transactional Leadership shows middle positive correlation with Transformational Leadership.

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), whose basic aim is the contribution of scientific developments and providing services have been showing an increasing interest in evaluation of productivity and quality. In fact, productivity and quality evaluation is essential for all type of organizations since the evaluation helps organization to set short and long term goals by defining the current situations, future expectations and the roadmap to fulfill these expectations. The studies on evaluation of academic productivity and quality have led to development of new academic fields such as Bibliometrics, Scientometrics and Informetrics. Consequently, new academic journals specialized on these disciplines have emerged. Moreover, during the last twenty years, as an outcome of these new emerging academic fields, several university ranking systems have been developed both at national and global level. Although these university ranking systems have attracted attention / they have been criticized due to a number of issues such as inappropriateness of indicators chosen, scoring procedure adopted, etc. In this study, an academic performance evaluation and ranking system has been developed and implemented. The new system which processes about 2,000 world universities is based on data from non subjective, reliable and universally accepted online sources. The scoring procedure includes statistical analysis and data has been collected via a tool developed for this purpose to eliminate human errors.

The aim of the present doctoral thesis was to examine to what extent personality traits and approaches to learning contribute to academic performance in upper secondary school (high school), after controlling for the well-known fact that general intelligence accounts for a large part of the variance. The general proposition of the thesis is that personality traits are stable dispositions and therefore predispose an individual to behave or act in a specific manner (Costa & McCrae, 1976). Additionally, another important determinant of academic performance is students’ approaches to learning, the way someone studies and makes sense of a particular school subject (Biggs, 1999). Study I examined how personality traits, divided into facets, predict academic performance in different school subjects. The results from several SEM analyses showed that personality, specifically Conscientiousness, has a positive influence on academic performance. In addition, there was a negative relation between Extraversion and academic performance and a positive relation between Neuroticism and academic performance. There were also interesting findings on the facet levels for all traits. The major conclusion of this study is that personality traits, both on the factor level and on the facet level, are important to academic performance in general, but sometimes more specifically to different school subjects. In Study II, the aim was to investigate the unique contribution of learning approaches to academic performance. A second aim was to explore possible gender differences in learning approaches. It was found that learning approaches contributed uniquely to academic performance, over and above personality and general intelligence. Differences between girls and boys were found, both with respect to the use of learning approaches and the consequences of these learning approaches for performance results. Based on a longitudinal design, the aim of Study III was to explore to what extent personality traits predict academic performance. Conscientiousness, Extraversion and Neuroticism were found to predict overall academic performance. Results suggest that personality traits, as measured at the age of 16, can predict academic performance at the age of 19, and more specifically: the grades of conscientious students improved from age 16 to age 19. This study extends previous work by assessing the relationship between the Big Five and academic performance over a three-year period.

The previous research on student debt indicates that the financial concerns associated with being in debt have a significant effect on the individual's academic performance. In the present study, a sample of 328 current students at the University of Canterbury was questioned to identify the effects of student debt on students' course selection, motivation, happiness and academic performance. Students' debt levels increased with the level of university study, and the largest form of student borrowing was from the Student Loan Scheme. While students with no debt performed better academically than those with debt, students' attitudes towards debt were found to influence the relationship between debt level and academic performance. Students who were tolerant towards debt performed better as they accumulated more debt while students who were intolerant performed worse. In general, there is little indication that student debt has a direct effect on students' course selection, motivation, happiness and academic performance. Implications of current findings are mentioned. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

Doctor of Philosophy / The main aim of this research is the exploration of relationships and correlations between thinking styles of student designers, their personal aptitudes, and design education. It involves discovering the role/s several groups of learning styles and cognitive abilities may play in problem solving during administered design tasks; and the influence they may have on academic performance and quality of produced design solutions. The main hypothesis is that differences in designers’ individual problem solving strategies and, ultimately, products of their expertise – designed artefacts – can be correlated with the differences in their learning styles and cognitive abilities. We suggest the following. (a) Designers with different styles adopt different approaches to design situations and use different strategies during problem solving. It is possible to find the supporting evidence by investigating their performance on design tasks. (b) Individual differences in design reasoning and problem solving could be correlated with the differences in individual cognitive abilities. (c) It may be possible to find correlations between cognitive styles and cognitive abilities. (d) It is likely that a number of visible or measurable qualities of students’ design drawings, would in some way reflect different characteristics of the above individual styles and abilities. The methodological approach draws on theoretical and empirical knowledge from several domains, including: design studies, psychology, cognitive science and study of creativity. This study is concerned with selecting and substantiating the input – a number of cognitive styles and abilities chosen for evaluation; and their subsequent assessment. It involves administering design sessions and exploring them as a process to see whether and how the above abilities and styles are reflected in problem solving. It also deals with the assessment of the product i.e. produced design solutions, and their relation to the academic performance reports. And, finally, it explores correlations between the input, the process and the product to help finding explanations for the students’ preferences in adopting particular problem solving strategies in designing. This study is based upon the analysis of six major datasets from (1) an electronic test assessing individual positions on four dimensions (two dichotomies) of learning styles; (2) tests of cognitive abilities chosen on the basis of their relevance to designing; (3) design sessions, administered individually under retrospective protocol guidelines; (4) questionnaires, containing summaries of design sessions, and introspective reports of imagery use and problem-solving styles and strategies; (5) judgements of academic performance from course supervisors based on marks and grades; and (6) assessments of design drawings by professional architects. The analysis revealed fundamentally different ways by which students approach design situations; they are positively correlated with their learning styles. Students’ approaches to problem situations change with the task and within the task. However, eighty percent of the first year and half of the final year subjects showed various degrees of inflexibility in dealing with design problems; this may have decreased the quality of performance. Learning styles proved important in predicting the process and the outcome of problem solving. They may account for moderate to low quality of design solutions in cases with either style (from both dichotomies explored) being of low development. Styles were also observed to may have a moderate to strong influence on the students’ academic performance. Correlations between the measured cognitive abilities and academic performance were moderate to significant for the first year and similar but marginally lower for the final year students. At the same time, final year students scored higher on the ability tests and showed better results on the learning styles assessments. One of the likely reasons for this is the enhancement of abilities and styles during the course of study. No significant linear correlations between preferred learning styles and most of the measured cognitive abilities have been observed. The probable inference is that abilities are among many other factors affecting the development of learning styles. It has been, however, possible to establish a number of important correlations between the measurements of learning styles, cognitive abilities, observed problem solving behaviour, and students’ design solutions. Overall, it has been demonstrated that the applied methodology, although requiring further refinement, does enable examining and elucidating the influence of learning styles and cognitive abilities on design problem solving and academic performance.

Thesis (M. Med. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2005.

Past research has explored the concurrent and longitudinal associations between externalizing behaviours, marijuana use, and academic outcomes and has found that externalizing behaviours and marijuana use negatively affect academic performance. However, precursors to these pathways are not well understood. Early evidence of academic aptitude is an important predictor of academic performance in high school. Performance at a young age does not guarantee results in high school and low early academic aptitude does not necessarily result in low later performance. It is important to understand the factors that may impact students’ academic performance as they proceed through middle school and high school, and how early academic aptitude can influence risk factors that impact later academic performance. This project examines the role that marijuana use and externalizing behaviours play in the association between early academic aptitude and later academic performance. The project uses six waves of data from the Victoria Healthy Youth Survey (V-HYS), a 10-year prospective longitudinal study. A community-based sample of youth (N = 662; 48% male; ages 12 to 18) were surveyed biannually from 2003 (W1) to 2014 (W6). Frequency of marijuana use over the past year and externalizing behaviours were assessed at each time point. To assess academic aptitude, participants’ British Columbia Foundation Skills Assessment (FSA) percentile scores in numeracy, reading, and writing were measured in grades 7 and/or 10. Academic performance was assessed using participants’ provincially reported grade 12 English and Math course percentage grades as well as self-reported grade 12 grades. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to test the possible mediating and moderating effect of marijuana frequency and externalizing behaviours in the association between academic aptitude and academic performance. Academic aptitude was positively associated with academic performance (B = .59, SE = .04, p < .001) and negatively associated with marijuana use (B = -.21, SE = .04, p < .001). Marijuana use was negatively associated with academic performance (B = -.25, SE = .04, p < .001). The indirect effect of marijuana use was significant (b = .04, SE = .01, 95% CI = .018, .068). In terms of moderation, for the High Externalizing group (n = 75, 47% males), no paths were significant. For the Low Externalizing group (n = 445, 49% males), all paths were significant, and the indirect effect was significant (B = .05, SE = .02, CI = 0.01, 0.08). Marijuana use mediates the association between early academic aptitude and later academic performance, indicating the importance of early prevention and intervention. Externalizing behaviours moderated this association. While youth with externalizing behaviours are at high risk for marijuana use and should be targeted for intervention, youth who do not exhibit externalizing behaviours should also be included for prevention and intervention and may require different strategies. / Graduate