Global ETD Search

1	The impact of psychosocial factors on achievement gains between eighth and tenth grade Kuo, Yi-Lung 01 May 2011 (has links) This study investigated the roles of the psychosocial factors (PSFs) of motivation, social control, and self-regulation, in the prediction of 10th grade academic achievement for a large sample of 8th grade students. The differential effects of PSFs for male and female students with different levels of 8th grade achievement were also examined. Of the 4,660 middle-school students in the ACT database, 1,384 8th grade students were included in the study. The Student Readiness Inventory-Middle School (SRI-MS) was used to assess three broad PSFs based on ten scales, which were named motivation (consisting of Academic Discipline, Commitment to School, and Optimism), social control (consisting of Family Attitude toward Education and Family Involvement, Relationships with School Personnel, and School Safety Climate), and self-regulation (consisting of Managing Feelings, Orderly Conduct, and Thinking before Acting). The students' EXPLORE and PLAN Composite scores served as measures of initial and later academic achievement, respectively. Multiple regression models were constructed for each PSF to test the hypotheses. Post hoc probing techniques were used if significant interaction terms were found. If no significant interaction terms were found, the effects of PSFs on achievement gains were examined using a psychosocial mediation model. The results showed that 8th grade females demonstrated greater motivation, social control, and self-regulation than 8th grade males. Also, motivation and social control each interacted significantly with sex and 8th grade achievement when predicting 10th grade achievement. Specifically, among female students, effects were positive for females with higher prior achievement and negative for females with lower prior achievement for both motivation and social control. For male students, neither motivation nor social control added significantly to the prediction of later achievement. There were no interactions between self-regulation and either sex or prior achievement. Instead, self-regulation partially mediated the effects of initial achievement when predicting later academic achievement. motivation psychosocial factors self-regulation social control the Matthew effect Educational Psychology
2	Předškolní schopnosti: Evropská srovnávací studie / Pre-school abilities: European comparative study Neufussová, Monika January 2020 (has links) Pre-school education improves cognitive and non-cognitive skills of children, and the positive effects persist to adulthood. The literature provides rich ev- idence of beneficial effects of pre-school, some of them even causal. However, most studies come from the US, and the research lacks a comprehensive pic- ture of European countries concerning pre-school education. I contribute to the research by providing a comparison of European countries regarding pre- school attendance, pre-school skills, and test scores in fourth grade. In Section ??, I focus on the Czech Republic. The results show that more educated moth- ers are more likely to send children to pre-school. In most countries, children with stronger pre-school skills achieve higher results on standardized tests in fourth grade, which supports the idea of the existence of the Matthew effect. In the Czech Republic, pre-school attendance may increase fourth-grade test scores by 0.3 SD. The most important pre-school skill is the ability to read, which is associated with an increase in fourth-grade math achievement of 0.2 SD. The results contribute to the literature on pre-school education in Eu- rope; however, they should not be interpreted causally, as they are essentially a description of the pre-school context in Europe. 1
3	Inference generation in the reading of expository texts by university students Pretorius, Elizabeth Josephine 02 1900 (has links) The continued underperformance of many L2 students at primary, secondary and tertiary level is a cause for grave concern in South Africa. In an attempt to better understand the cognitivelinguistic conditions and processes that underlie academic performance and underperformance, this study looks at the problem of differential academic performance by focussing on the inferential ability of undergraduate L2 students during the reading of expository texts. The study works within a constructivist theory of reading, where the successful understanding of a text is seen to involve the construction of a mental representation of what the text is about. Inferencing plays an important role in constructing meaning during reading because it enables the reader to link incoming information with already given information, and it enables the reader to construct a mental representation of the meaning of a text by converting the linear input into a hierarchical mental representation of interrelated information. The main finding showed that the ability to make inferences during the reading of expository texts was strongly related to academic performance: the more inferences students made during the reading of expository texts, the better they performed academically. This relationship held across the making of various inferences, such as anaphoric inferences, vocabulary inferences, inferences about various semantic relations, and thematic inferences. In particular, the ability to make anaphoric, contrastive and causal inferences emerged as the strongest predictors of academic performance. The study provides strong empirical evidence that the ability to make inferences during reading enables a reader to construct meaning and thereby also to acquire new knowledge. Reading is not only a tool for independently accessing information in an information-driven society, it is fundamentally a tool for constructing meaning. Reading and inferencing are not additional tools that students need to master in the learning context- they constitute the very process whereby learning occurs. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D.Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics) Reading L2 readers Meaning construction L2 proficiency Learning context Academic performance The Matthew effect Inferencing Anamorphic inferencing Vocabulary inferencing Text-semantic relations Thematic inferences 418.40711 Reading (Higher education) Reading comprehension -- South Africa Reading disability -- South Africa Content area reading -- South Africa Second language acquisition Inference Cognition Academic achievement
4	Elevers läsvanor : En kvalitativ studie av fyra fordonselevers läsvanor / Pupils’ Reading Habits: A Qualitative Study on the Reading Habits of Four Pupils in the Motor Vehicle Program Gustafsson, Frans January 2016 (has links) The following study was conducted at an upper secondary school in Sweden and attempts to explore the question of what influences male pupils’ reading habits. Many quantitative international studies, including PISA, PIRLS and IEA Reading Literacy, have sought to answer this question, but only partially succeeded due to the limitations of their methods. Therefore, this study seeks to explore this question in more depth using qualitative methods, including interviews and classroom observations, but also minor tests. Two facts which the previously mentioned international studies have found is that boys and particularly immigrant boys tend to have worse reading results than their counterparts. It is therefore the aim of this study to study four male students in upper secondary school; of which two are native Swedes and the other two are unaccompanied refugee children; one from Afghanistan and the other from Morocco. The findings of this study are as follows. Firstly, necessity was found to be the single most important factor for the reading habits of these four pupils; especially the two refugees. Both refugees learnt to read under harsh circumstances in madrassas in their respective home countries. Moreover, the Moroccan pupil learnt to speak and read Spanish fluently during his seven years as a homeless child. Furthermore, in the absence of necessity, interest was found to be decisive in determining the pupils’ reading habits. In addition to this, the study theorizes that an interest in reading generally arises before the ability to read and not vice versa. However, teachers can in fact affect their pupils’ reading habits even in upper secondary school. Reading habits interest in reading reading proficiency reading development path of least resistance self-efficacy the peer effect the Matthew effect operant conditioning the zone of proximal development the social cognitive theory the theory of cognitive development word decoding unaccompanied refugee children Läsvanor läsintresse läsförmåga läsutveckling minsta motståndets lag självförmåga kamrateffekten Matteus-effekten operant betingning proximalzonsteorin den sociokognitiva teorin den kognitiva utvecklingsteorin ordavkodning ensamkommande flyktingbarn fordonsprogrammet och gymnasium.
5	Inference generation in the reading of expository texts by university students Pretorius, Elizabeth Josephine 02 1900 (has links) The continued underperformance of many L2 students at primary, secondary and tertiary level is a cause for grave concern in South Africa. In an attempt to better understand the cognitivelinguistic conditions and processes that underlie academic performance and underperformance, this study looks at the problem of differential academic performance by focussing on the inferential ability of undergraduate L2 students during the reading of expository texts. The study works within a constructivist theory of reading, where the successful understanding of a text is seen to involve the construction of a mental representation of what the text is about. Inferencing plays an important role in constructing meaning during reading because it enables the reader to link incoming information with already given information, and it enables the reader to construct a mental representation of the meaning of a text by converting the linear input into a hierarchical mental representation of interrelated information. The main finding showed that the ability to make inferences during the reading of expository texts was strongly related to academic performance: the more inferences students made during the reading of expository texts, the better they performed academically. This relationship held across the making of various inferences, such as anaphoric inferences, vocabulary inferences, inferences about various semantic relations, and thematic inferences. In particular, the ability to make anaphoric, contrastive and causal inferences emerged as the strongest predictors of academic performance. The study provides strong empirical evidence that the ability to make inferences during reading enables a reader to construct meaning and thereby also to acquire new knowledge. Reading is not only a tool for independently accessing information in an information-driven society, it is fundamentally a tool for constructing meaning. Reading and inferencing are not additional tools that students need to master in the learning context- they constitute the very process whereby learning occurs. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / D.Litt. et Phil. (Linguistics) Reading L2 readers Meaning construction L2 proficiency Learning context Academic performance The Matthew effect Inferencing Anamorphic inferencing Vocabulary inferencing Text-semantic relations Thematic inferences 418.40711 Reading (Higher education) Reading comprehension -- South Africa Reading disability -- South Africa Content area reading -- South Africa Second language acquisition Inference Cognition Academic achievement

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