Background Technical, nonengineering required courses taken at the onset of an engineering degree provide students a foundation for engineering coursework. Students who perform poorly in these foundational courses, even in those tailored to engineering, typically have limited success in engineering. A profile approach may explain why these courses are obstacles for engineering students. This approach examines the interaction among motivation and self‐regulation constructs. Purpose (Hypothesis) This project sought to determine what motivational and self‐regulated learning profiles engineering students adopt in foundational courses. We hypothesized that engineering students would adopt profiles associated with maladaptive motivational beliefs and self‐regulated learning behaviors. The effects of profile adoption on learning and differences associated with student major, minor, and gender were analyzed. Design/Method Five hundred and thirty‐eight students, 332 of them engineering majors, were surveyed on motivation and self‐regulation variables. Data were analyzed from a learner‐centered profile approach using cluster analysis. Results We obtained a five‐cluster learning profile solution. Approximately 83% of engineering students enrolled in an engineering‐tailored foundational computer science course adopted maladaptive profiles. These students learned less than those who adopted adaptive learning profiles. Profile adoption depended on whether a student was considering a major or minor in computer science or not. Conclusions Findings indicate the motivational and self‐regulated learning profiles that engineering students adopt in foundational courses, why they do so, and what profile adoption means for learning. Our findings can guide instructors in providing motivational beliefs and self‐regulated learning scaffolds in the classroom.

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This article reports an investigation of a professional development program to enhance elementary teachers’ ability to engage their students in argument from evidence in science. Using a quasi-experimental approach, three versions were compared: Version A—a 1-week summer institute with a 2-week summer practicum experience and 8 follow-up days (four per year), Version B without the practicum experience, and Version C—a revision of Version A in Year 3. All teachers were videoed twice each year, and the videos were rated using an instrument to measure the quality of discourse. All versions led to a significant improvement in teachers’ facilitation of classroom discourse. Neither the practicum nor the revised program had an additional effect. Implications for the field are discussed.

Students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD) frequently experience significant difficulty mastering basic academic skills. This meta-analysis focuses on one specific potential area of learning difficulties for these students: namely, writing. To identify the extent and depth of the potential writing challenges faced by students with ADHD, we conducted a meta-analysis comparing the writing performance of grade 1 to 12 students with ADHD to their normally achieving peers. We located 44 papers, yielding 45 studies with 87 effect sizes. The average weighted effect sizes showed that students with ADHD obtained lower scores than their normally achieving peers for writing quality (-0.78), output (-0.64), number of genre elements (-0.69), vocabulary (-0.76), spelling (-0.80), and handwriting (-0.62). Contrary to expectations, moderator analyses found that neither study quality nor the source from which ADHD students were drawn (i.e., school/community vs. clinic/hospital) accounted for variability above sampling error alone.

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In this meta-analysis, we examined whether children classified with specific language impairment (SLI) experience difficulties with writing. We included studies comparing children with SLI to (a) typically developing peers matched on age ( k = 39 studies) and (b) typically developing younger peers with similar language capabilities ( k = six studies). Children classified with SLI scored lower on writing measures than their typically developing peers matched on age ( g = −0.97) when all writing scores in a study were included in the analysis. This same pattern occurred for specific measures of writing: quality ( g = −0.92), output ( g = −1.00), grammar ( g = −0.68), vocabulary ( g = −0.68), and spelling ( g = −1.17). A moderator analysis revealed that differences in the writing scores of children classified with SLI and typically developing peers matched on age were not as large, but were still statistically significant, when assessment involved a contrived response format (vs. measured based on students’ writing), researcher-created measures (vs. norm-referenced tests), or SLI included just children with a speech disorder (vs. children with a language disorder). Children classified with SLI further scored lower on writing than typically developing peers with similar language capabilities ( g = −0.47). We concluded that children with SLI experience difficulties with writing.

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Katherine Cheng is a doctoral student at the Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University. She is interested in understanding the origins of students' academic performance and their well-being. Kat completed her BS and MA in Psychology, and is currently majoring in Family and Human Development. Her research emphasizes a multi-disciplinary perspective, including bringing together constructs from the fields of motivation, human development, and biopsychology. Her research is dedicated to understanding the links between students' emotions, emotion regulation, attention, and future-oriented motivation with respect to optimal school performance and physiological well-being. Understanding Engineering Students Stress and Emotions during an Introductory Engineering courseAlthough recent literature in engineering education has focused on student enjoyment of coursework and its influence on student retention, 1-3 very little research has incorporated theoretical frameworks which identify the specific roles that student beliefs and emotions play in course engagement. 4 To supplement self-report measures when assessing students' emotions in learning environments, many educational researchers have attempted to tie physiological responses to students' beliefs, affects, and motivation -including those that utilized self-reported bodily responses, brain imaging, galvanic skin responses, and cardiovascular responding. [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] Some researchers in education, but not many, have utilized the biological marker salivary cortisol to indicate students' stress and emotional states. 13, 14Notably, a multi-method interdisciplinary approach in engineering educational research has yet to be established. Interdisciplinary work, however, is crucial for incorporating theories with practice in education, since the inclusion of biomarkers in emotionand-motivation-related research could provide support for current theory and its application, to enhance learning and course engagement. Using salivary cortisol as a tool in engineering educational research allows us to take advantage of saliva's sampling convenience, and its informative nature that is not readily affected by social desirability, reactivity, and memory. In essence, the current study aimed to address two gaps in the engineering educational literature: 1) to bridge research in engineering students' beliefs and emotions with theory, and 2) to explore an interdisciplinary approach to understanding how engineering students engage in their courses using salivary cortisol. Theoretical frameworksThe field is gravitating towards an understanding and acceptance of the roles that motivation, beliefs, and emotions play in engineering education.4, 15 However, theory-based empirical research is much needed in order to tease apart the mechanisms of how each psychological construct is associated with another. In the current study, we used two motivational frameworks: Control-Value Theory (CVT) 16,17 and Future Time Perspective Theory (FTPT). 18 CVT addr...