The three basic purposes of this study were (1) to determine relationships existing between academic achievement in middle schools and academic achievement in traditional junior high schools, (2) to determine the relationships existing between personal adjustment in middle schools and personal adjustment in traditional junior high schools, and (3) to determine the relationships between academic achievement and personal adjustment in both middle schools and traditional junior high schools.

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between career education and the career maturity of eighth-grade students as measured by the Attitude Scale and the Competence Test of the Career Maturity Inventory. A posttest only experimental design was used for the study. The subjects were selected from a population of eighth-grade students in a suburban school district in north central Texas and randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. The treatment group had a career education class for forty-five minutes each day for eighteen weeks. The control group selected an additional elective. Multiple t tests were used to test the hypotheses of the study. The hypotheses were grouped into the areas of maturity of career attitudes, maturity of career competencies, sex and career maturity, school and career maturity, and teacher and career maturity.

The main objective of this thesis was to explore issues related to student achievement motivation in the Swedish TIMSS 2003 (Trend in International Mathematics and Science Study) context. The thesis comprises of five empirical papers and a summary. The expectancy-value theory of achievement motivation was used as the general theoretical framework in all empirical papers, and all papers are concerned with construct validation in one form or another. Aspects of student achievement motivation were measured on a task-specific level (motivation to do well on the TIMSS test) and on a domain-specific level (self-concept in and valuing of mathematics and science) and regressed on test performance. The first paper reports the development and validation of scores from an instrument measuring aspects related to student test-taking motivation. It was shown that a number of items in the instrument could be interpreted as a measure of test-taking motivation, and that the test-taking motivation construct was distinct from other related constructs. The second paper related the Swedish students’ ratings of mathematics test-taking motivation to mathematics performance in TIMSS 2003. The students in the sample on average reported that they were well motivated to do their best on the TIMSS mathematics test and their ratings of test-taking motivation were positively but rather weakly related to achievement. In the third and the fourth papers, the internal structure and relation to performance of the mathematics and science self-concept and task value scales used in TIMSS internationally was investigated for the Swedish TIMSS 2003 sample. For mathematics, it was shown that the internationally derived scales were suitable also for the Swedish sample. It was further shown that ratings of self-concept were rather strongly related to mathematics achievement while ratings of mathematics value were basically unrelated to mathematics achievement. For the science subjects, the internal structure of the scales was less simple, and ratings of self-concept and valuing of science were not very strongly related to science achievement. The study presented in the fifth paper used interviews and an open-ended questionnaire item to further investigate student test-taking motivation and perceptions of the TIMSS test. The results mainly corroborated the results from study II. In the introductory part of the thesis, the empirical studies are summarized, contextualized, and discussed. The discussion relates obtained results to theoretical assumptions, applied implications, and to issues of validity in the TIMSS context.

The purpose of this investigation was to develop a curriculum guide to be made available to junior high schools in the state of Arkansas. A study of the amount of health knowledge possessed by eighth grade students in Arkansas was made to assist the investigator in the construction of the curriculum guide. The objective of the study was to determine the quality of the health education possessed by the eight grade students in Arkansas, in terms of teacher qualifications and number of hours heath education is taught per year, and compare it with students across the nation to build a suggested curriculum guide in health education. The following conclusions were reached: 1) Arkansas eight grade students are one school year behind national norms, relative through the AAHPER Cooperative Health Test results. 2) Female students scored higher than male students. 3) There is little variance between the different sizes of schools and the knowledge possessed by students in the several content areas on the AAHPER Cooperative Health Test. 5) The instruction of health education varied greatly in quality among Arkansas schools in the study. 6) Instructors teaching health education to eighth grade students in Arkansas were usually teachers not prepared to teach health education.The culminating activity of this investigation was the development of a curriculum guide from the data in the study of Arkansas students. The most widely accepted model in health education was chosen, the School Health Education Study Model. The nature of the model is such that new findings in health education do not invalidate the model.