This applied research in education was undertaken within the context of a school mentoring programme, where my role as a mentor researcher is directed at promoting change in teacher pedagogy consistent with junior-high school educational reforms in Israel. The purpose of this study has been twofold: 1) to confront conflicting issues that exist between the need for change in teacher pedagogy and the resistance felt by many of them toward ‘never ending’ new reforms and: 2). to investigate the impact of the mentoring model (MM) on learning processes that foster teacher empowerment. Assessment of empowerment, as both a process and a product, drew on the teachers' metacognitive development, growing sense of satisfaction and self-efficacy as mediators of their pupils' thinking/learning skills. This study presents a unique approach to teacher empowerment through its theoretical and methodological perspectives. Socio-cultural perspectives serve as an over-arching framework through which various theoretical perspectives for learning and development may be integrated. Action research and discourse analysis were found to be compatible with the researcher’s philosophical approach, whereby educators engage in a collaborative learning process that promotes shared visions and goals. Promoting the characteristics of a learning organisation within the school shed light on ways that can provide teachers with a nurturing environment within the complex dynamics of the school. The detailed account and interpretation of the multi-level reciprocal interactions that occur between teachers, mentor and the school organisation presented in this study is especially significant for understanding multidimensional developmental processes. It illustrates the evolution of inventive methodological tools (such as skills rubrics and discourse analysis techniques), which assume to provide new perspectives for fostering the teachers’ trust in their own judgement when mediating higher order thinking skills. These findings are of particular relevance as contemporary research indicates that teachers often experience difficulties in practicing metacognitive pedagogy.

Researchers adopting the strength-energy model of self-control (Baumeister et al., 1998) have suggested that taxing situations (i.e., self-control demands) exhaust a limited self-control resource and leave individuals in a state of self-regulatory fatigue known as “ego-depletion.” Following the onset of ego-depletion, numerous studies have shown that individuals are more susceptible to lapses in self-control, including failure to resist alcohol consumption. Self-determination theory (SDT; Ryan & Deci, 2000) researchers have contributed to this body of research in at least two major ways. First, they have suggested that psychological need satisfaction may hold a restorative function and buffer against the ego-depleting effects of self-control demands during the day (Ryan & Deci, 2008). Second, they have empirically demonstrated that self-control resources may only be needed to execute responses involving greater controlled (CR) than autonomous (AR) regulation (Moller et al., 2006). Drawing upon each of these perspectives, the current study investigated: a) whether students reporting greater self-control demands during the day would be protected from higher levels of ego-depletion during the evening if they perceived greater psychological need satisfaction during the day, and b) whether students reporting higher levels of ego-depletion during the evening would be at greater risk of alcohol-related self-control failure at night if they reported relatively greater controlled than autonomous regulation for limiting their nighttime drinking. Two independent samples of university students were recruited during the Fall 2015 (Sample 1; n = 175) and Spring 2016 (Sample 2; n = 204) semesters. Across three (Sample 1) and four (Sample 2) week periods, students were prompted to complete measures of self-control demands and psychological need satisfaction during the day, and ego-depletion, alcohol-related self-control failure, and self-regulation for limiting alcohol consumption during the night. Using multilevel analysis, findings revealed a positive association between self-control demands and ego-depletion. This association was moderated by psychological need satisfaction during some temporal periods more than others. Findings also revealed a positive association between ego-depletion and alcohol-related self-control failure, but only among Sample 1 participants. Findings did not implicate self-regulation as a moderator of this relationship. The applicability of the strength-energy model is discussed in relation to student drinking behaviour. / Graduate / 2017-12-14 / tcarey@uvic.ca

Quality of appearance is important in nature and individuals have a basic need to establish the normality of appearance to confirm their acceptability to others. In daily inter-relationships of the same species, for instance, normal-appearing members of a species group reject or kill other members who appear abnormal. In human society, appearance is considered as one of the most direct sources of information about other people, and unattractiveness is often accompanied by negative judgments, which can cause emotional distress and isolation. Accordingly, humans tend to pay great attention to their personal appearance and make improvements to enhance their self-representations. The growth of the beauty and cosmetic surgery industries is an indication of an increasing willingness to enhance physical appearance. However, despite the growing demand for cosmetic procedures, the consumer research literature on this topic is extremely sparse. In fact, little is known about the attitudinal and motivational drivers that facilitate undergoing such procedures. This dissertation enriches our understanding of factors that affect consumers’ motivation to pursue cosmetic procedures and examines the role of emotions in such decisions. To that end, objective self-awareness (OSA) theory is applied and the interplay between the state of public OSA, beauty standards, and self-conscious emotions of shame and pride is explored. The results of two experimental studies indicate that access to beauty standards coupled with the state of public OSA generates self-standard comparison thoughts that may yield self-standard discrepancies. Negative emotions experienced due to such discrepancies move individuals into a self-regulatory cycle with the purpose of discrepancy reduction and impact their motivation to undergo cosmetic procedures. Pride and shame, two central self-conscious emotions, influence self-regulatory strategies and differently impact the approach to discrepancy reduction. These findings contribute to the research advocating the role of emotions in decision making and provide more insights about self-conscious emotions and their role in regulating goal pursuit behavior. The findings provide practical implications for marketers of cosmetics products and services, social marketers trying to encourage or discourage certain behaviors, and public policy makers. Moreover, the results have wide-ranging implications for structuring programs designed to contribute to consumer welfare.

Personality is a topic that has been researched for a long time, however studies on non-human animals has only recently gained increased attention. In humans, impulsivity is a personality trait correlated with a wide variety of disorders. Impulsivity has also been shown to affect cognition, making it potentially having broad-ranged influences on the behavior of individuals. In this study, impulsivity was studied on white leghorn chicks (Gallus gallus domesticus) in two tests: a motor self-regulation test and a self-control test. Motor self-regulation, or the ability to inhibit motor impulses caused by external stimuli, was tested and compared between males and females. In this test there were differences between the impulsive behavior of the sexes. Self-control, or the ability to wait for a bigger, but delayed reward over a small and instant reward, was also studied. There were no sex-differences in self-control. Further, no correlation was observed between self-control and motor self-regulation. This suggest that the tests investigate different aspects of impulsivity, highlighting the complexity of impulsive behavior. Because this work was also carried out to evaluate and develop the two tests for a chicken model, I also discuss how these tests could be improved in the future.

Research on healthy eating motivation has shown that people who are autonomously motivated tend to engage in healthier eating behaviours than people with controlled forms of motivation (Ng et al., 2012; Verstuyf et al., 2012). However, healthy eating requires both trying to eat healthy foods (i.e., approach goals) and trying to avoid unhealthy foods (i.e., avoidance goals), and previous research on the association between motivation and approach-avoidance eating goals is mixed (Harrison et al., 2011; Otis & Pelletier, 2008). In the current study, we explored the relationship between motivation and approach-avoidance goals using a 21-day daily diary design. Our findings indicated that approach goals were more difficult than avoidance goals and that higher relative autonomous motivation was associated with greater approach goal success, but not avoidance goal success. We also investigated the relationship between goal specificity, the temporal scope of approach-avoidance goals, and goal success/failure. Our findings are consistent with previous research on motivation and goal difficulty (Aitken et al., 2016; Green-Demers et al., 1997), but our approach-avoidance goal difficulty findings warrant further investigation. / Graduate / 2018-06-11

Why is trait self-control associated with successful goal progress? Existing research has attempted to answer this question by focusing on individual differences in the process of goal pursuit. Herein, we propose and test a novel mechanism suggesting that self-control facilitates goal attainment not only by affecting the process of goal pursuit but also the type of goals peo- ple select in the first place. Three studies showed that high (vs. low) self- control individuals are more likely to report successful goal attainment and this association was mediated by their tendency to select the goals that reflect their true/authentic self. These results were obtained using cross-sectional and longitudinal designs and were robust against controlling for previously established mechanisms of the effect of trait self-control on goal attainment (habit strength, experiences of goal-conflicting desires). Overall, there findings contribute to the literatures on self-regulation, authenticity and goal management.

1. There are two major pieces of work (the Code Review and Sutton) and a number of themes that are the subject matter for this submission. The Insurance Council of Australia appointed me as the Independent Reviewer of the General Insurance Code of Practice, under the Code and the Terms of Reference, on 3 May 2012. 2. The Code Review work took about two years and involved the Code Issues Paper in October 2012 of 111 pages and the Code Review Report in May 2013 of 205 pages. The majority of my recommendations were accepted and the report has made a contribution to the rethinking of self-regulation and the place of voluntary codes in financial services. By then I was writing, with Professor Robert Merkin QC Sutton on Insurance Law for its 4th Edition. It is two volumes, 24 chapters and about 2100 pages excluding tables and index; my contribution was 12 chapters totalling about 960 pages. 3. The Code Review work, particularly on government agency regulation and self-regulation, influenced the pervasive material in Sutton on regulation. It was the subject of the AIDA Rome paper in 2014 on Principles for Self-Regulation; the paper was published by AIDA. 4. Sutton was published in 2015. Its themes are set out below. Those themes are in turn influences in the other work for this submission. There are seven main themes in the publications which I present in this submission. 5. The historical influences in relation to my Code Review and the historical contextual material in Sutton stimulated my interest in the wider influences on the development of commerce, insurance and law, with a central interest in the ethical foundations of the law and regulation. This aspect was also developed in the Masel Lecture and the article William Murray, Lord Mansfield: His Life, Times and Legacy – Good Faith and Good Works. 6. There had been a number of issues raised in my Code Review about mental illness, insurance and discrimination. I spoke at AIDA in Rome 2014 on Insurance Discrimination Law and the paper was published by AIDA. Then in 2016, the Australian Centre for Financial Studies commissioned me to write the ACFS MID Paper on the use by insurers of mental illness data. The historical perspective and the regulatory framework were important features of both papers. 7. A number of the Sutton themes were first opened out in my Professional Indemnity Insurance Law. The main themes were, in decreasing order of connection with Professional Indemnity Insurance Law, as follows. The first theme is the identification, development and application of the indemnity principle. The second is the adaptation and application of the analysis of contracts by primary and secondary obligations. This theme is in Sutton on the main concepts in insurance as well as liability insurance issues. The Liability Disputes Chapter condenses this thinking and account. The third theme was a renovation of how life insurance issues should be analysed and presented. This life insurance material was then adapted and infused with practical guidance on the decision making process on some issues for the FOS Life Insurance Manual. I developed an aspect of life insurance in the TPD Article. Each of these themes are in my submission original in concept and execution. Each has influenced the development of the law by legisation and the courts.

A wealth of information exists on self-regulatory processes that have the potential to generate a population shift in health and well-being, but there are many barriers to progress. This thesis addresses three. The first is a lack of transparency and coherence in terminology surrounding 'stress' and 'well-being'. This was addressed using a taxonomy based on self-regulatory theory to provide a platform for clearer differentiation and enhancement of psychological coping mechanisms. The second is the difficulty illuminating a public deluged with contradictory information. This was addressed by demonstrating a means of generating publicly available, validated instruments of change, through more open, transparent and collaborative research. The third barrier is that information provision alone is not enough to induce sustainable behaviour change. This was addressed by systematically exploring ways of optimising intervention adherence, impact and adaptive habit formation. The research programme consisted of three experimental studies. Study 1 piloted a means of adding depth and ingenuity to efforts to achieve personal daily goals, using an adaptation of Pennebaker's experimental writing paradigm, underpinned by social cognitive theory. Framework analysis of interviews with participants led to the development of a web-based version of the intervention, incorporating elements from dual-processing theory. Study 2 investigated effects of this intervention on self-report measures of psychological well-being in a group of 33 university administrators, assessed at baseline and four follow-up time points over twelve months. Sustained improvements were significant for goal progress, self-efficacy, perceived stress, negative affect, and symptoms of anxiety and depression. Study 3 tested the intervention using a randomised controlled trial involving 101 local government administrators. The results for self-report measures further supported and extended the findings of Study 2, whilst additional cortisol assessment proved inconclusive. Overall, the findings demonstrate a viable means of extending self-regulatory knowledge central to the pursuit of psychological and physiological well-being.

Writing skills are important for social and civic participation, educational achievement and employment (European Commission, 2012). However, a third to a half of Scottish students did not attain required writing standards at upper elementary and lower high school grades in 2014 (Scottish Government, 2015). Similarly, many students do not obtain the required skills in the USA (Graham et al., 2014). This study aimed to improve the writing skills of mainstream upper elementary and lower high school students. It took place in a largely rural Local Authority in Southern Scotland which was mid-range on measures of deprivation. The literature was reviewed on effective writing interventions for school-aged mainstream students. The interventions with the largest impacts around the target grades were: CIRC (Durukan, 2011); Collaborative Dialogic Learning (Alfassi, 2009); CSRI (Torrance et al., 2007); Jigsaw (Sahin, 2011); individual IT access in lessons (Snyder, 1993); individual IT access at home and school (Lowther et al., 2003); peer assistance with revision (Boscoli et al.,2004); process and product goals (Schunk et al., 1993); SRSD (Brunstein et al., 2011); summarisation (Chang et al., 2002); visualisation/imagery instruction (Jampole et al., 1994). An online survey of teachers’ current practices and beliefs about the teaching of writing was administered. The response rate was 23% (N=345) of the 1490 Local Authority-employed teachers in the region. Notable findings were: the respondents’ most frequently used practice was grammar instruction, an ineffective intervention (Graham et al., 2012; Graham et al., 2007). Many were using some evidence-based practices but not at optimum frequencies, and some were never using some of them. About 40% of respondents felt students had insufficient IT to support their writing and most would use IT more frequently if they had more up-to-date equipment, better internet access and extra training. Under half of elementary and high school respondents with English degrees felt Initial Teacher Education was adequate preparation to teach writing, while only 29% of high school respondents without English degrees felt adequately prepared to teach writing. Most viewed In Service Education more favourably but substantial numbers of respondents still felt inadequately prepared, particularly high school teachers without English degrees. All the high school respondents with English degrees and 91% of elementary respondents felt they were effective teachers of writing, but only 48% of high school respondents without English degrees felt they were effective at teaching writing. An evidence-based intervention was developed, the six-week Write Away programme, which included writing strategy instruction, self-regulation strategies and peer revision. It shared many features with CSRI (Torrance et al., 2007) and SRSD (Harris et al., 2009). Distinctive differences included that it incorporated Boscolo et al.'s (2004) model of peer revision rather than the think alouds used in CSRI, pupils did not create their own self-regulatory statements, pupils did not collaborate during drafting, pupils needed not spend long planning provided they revised their work, the finished essays would be displayed and peer revision continued following the teaching phase. This study was quasi-experimental and used both quantitative and qualitative methods. Participation was offered to large elementary schools which had two P6 (grade 5) pupil-only classes to allow for control and intervention classes. Two schools volunteered. Which pupils were in which condition depended on which teachers delivered the interventions. The control classes in both schools followed an on-going parallel intervention – the Big Writing programme (Wilson, 2012). Both schools were in towns and had similar pupil numbers (Eastfield=390, Westfield =361). The percentage entitled to Free School Meals in P4 to P7 at Eastfield was 11.8%, at Westfield it was 9.9%. The average age of the pupils was 10 years 7 months and numbers of male and female participants were broadly the same. Participation was also offered to all the region’s high schools. Only one responded with the requisite conditions for participation. This school (roll= 544) was in the largest town in the region. The percentage entitled to Free School Meals was 13.8%. The average age of the S2 (grade 8) students was 13 years 6 months and there was a preponderance of female participants. The online survey had shown that intervening with non-English specialists might be beneficial. This was compared with delivery by, or in combination with, English teachers. Social Studies was chosen because of its writing demands. A control and three different intervention conditions were used: English teacher only; Social Studies teacher only; English teacher and Social Studies teacher. Which students were in which condition depended on which teachers delivered the interventions. This was determined by the school, either by self-selection or randomly. Measures at both elementary and high school were the same. Teacher and student questionnaires were administered pre and post-test. Participant students were given written tasks pre and post-test. The length of the written tasks and plans were recorded. The written tasks were assessed by the researcher using a rubric developed by the researcher. There was a post-test focus group of intervention teachers at each level. Implementation fidelity was assessed through teacher logs and lesson observations by the researcher. Descriptive statistics were produced for the pupil/student questionnaires, task and plan word lengths and the written task scores for different elements and overall writing quality. Responses to open questions were categorized into themes and tabulated where possible. The teachers’ responses in the focus groups were collated into themes. Intervention and control writing scores pre and post-test and task and plan word length were analysed using Student’s t-tests. Student questionnaire post-test responses from the different conditions were compared with a theoretical distribution of equal values using the Chi-square test. Effect sizes were calculated for mean pupil/student questionnaire responses, task and plan mean word lengths and written task scores. High school student questionnaire responses at post-test were analysed using the Mann-Whitney test because the students were unlikely to be normally distributed. The Write Away programme led to large positive effect sizes for writing quality at P6 (ES: Eastfield= 2.89, N=25; Westfield = 2.70, N=19) and S2 (ES: Social Studies intervention = 1.37, N= 17; Social Studies and English intervention= 1.20, N=20; English intervention = 0.87, N=21). Effect sizes at P6 were double those of the most successful condition at S2. The Social Studies teacher and elementary intervention teachers felt the intervention improved writing quality and intended to do it again. However, the English specialists did not feel it made an impact and did not like it. The intervention successfully included peer revision of each other’s texts (Boscolo et al., 2004) at both elementary and high school levels in a programme of strategy instruction and self-regulation which resulted in large writing quality improvements. The study showed that high school Non-English specialists could deliver interventions with large effects on writing quality. The Social Studies teacher delivered the intervention with the greatest fidelity, improved writing quality the most and reported an increase in understanding of the subject, especially for more able students. The survey showed a need for In Service and this intervention could be used at upper elementary level and with high school non-English specialists in the appropriate genres. This applies to the UK and USA. Implications for practice, policy and future research are further discussed. This was the first study to investigate writing strategy instruction and self-regulation as part of an evidence-based intervention in Scotland.

This doctoral thesis presents the findings of a mixed methods case study of Learning Skills, a new approach to Learning to Learn that was developed and implemented at a secondary school in the south of England between 2010 and 2014, and evaluated using data collected between 2009 and 2017. Learning to Learn is a field of educational theory and practice that aims to help young people get better at learning by focusing on the processes of learning (the how as well as the what), and by enabling them to take ownership over aspects of their own learning through activities such as goal setting, self-monitoring and structured reflection. The field has developed significantly throughout the last 40 years, with a number of approaches having been implemented on a large scale in the UK. Research into metacognition and self-regulation suggests that Learning to Learn programmes should help boost academic attainment. To date however, large-scale evaluations have found mixed results, with no clear impact on academic attainment. Using an intervention design used widely in medicine and other fields, Learning Skills reconceptualises Learning to Learn as a 'complex intervention' comprised of multiple areas of evidence-informed practice. The rationale for complex interventions is that the marginal gains emerging from any individual avenue of practice stack up and interact to yield a larger effect size overall. The Learning Skills programme, which started as a year seven taught course and developed into a whole-school approach to teaching and learning, focuses centrally on three key concepts: metacognition, self-regulation and oracy. This evaluation of Learning Skills incorporates eight strands of data collection and analysis over an eight-year period, using the previous year group at the same school as a control group. These include baseline measures; attitude to learning scores; psychometric questionnaires; a language of learning evaluation; reflective learning journals; student interviews; teacher interviews; and student attainment across all subjects in years nine and 11. The primary outcome analysis - student attainment across all subject areas at three and five years - found that Learning Skills cohort one achieved significantly higher grades than the control cohort, with accelerated gains among young people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Secondary data analysis incorporating a range of qualitative and quantitative methods indicates a causal relationship between Learning Skills and academic attainment. As well as evaluating the impact of a new and promising approach to Learning to Learn, this study generates new knowledge about the implementation and evaluation of complex interventions in education.