This study tries to address the problems of Latino students by drawing on two distinct and emerging theoretical frameworks: (a) educationally resilient students and (b) classroom learning environments. The authors compared the motivation and learning environment of 60 resilient and 60 nonresilient Latino middle school students from a multiethnic metropolitan city located in the south central region of the United States. The multivariate analysis and univariate post hoc tests revealed that resilient students had significantly higherperceptions of involvement, satisfaction, academic self-concept, and achievement motivation than nonresilient students. The discriminantfunction analysis revealed that the variables of academic aspirations, involvement, academic self-concept, expectations for high school graduation, not being held back in school, and satisfaction were related most highly to the overall discriminant function. Results are discussed in relation to previous work on educational resilience and to implications for improving the education of students at risk of failure.

No abstract

Because the school environment has been shown to play an important role in teacher and student performance, we undertook research into the assessment of school environment, differences between female and male science teachers' perceptions of their school environments, and associations between these school environment perceptions and teachers' background characteristics. Although gender differences in science education have attracted both public concern and academic interest, little research has specifically addressed this issue in terms of the school environment. Data were collected from a large sample of 300 female and 518 male science teachers from secondary schools in Taiwan. Statistically significant gender differences were found in most aspects of the school environment, with female science teachers perceiving greater collegiality among teachers, higher gender equity among students, and stronger professional interest, and with male science teachers perceiving lower work pressure and better teacher-student relations. Gender differences in science teachers' perceptions of collegiality, work pressure, and gender equity in the school environment persisted even after controlling for teachers' background and school characteristics. Among the implications are recommendations about administrative policy for improving the school environment for both male and female teachers and about future research on factors associated with teachers' perceptions. ß

No abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether there are significant differences between effective and ineffective urban schools based on (a) students' classroom behavior and (b) students' motivation and perceptions of their classroom learning environment. Students from four effective and four ineffective urban elementary schools that served predominantly African American students were systematically observed during the school year and completed three surveys about 6 weeks before the end of the school year. Students from effective schools were observed significantly more (a) working in an individualized setting, (b) interacting with their teacher, and (c) working on written assignments. Students from effective schools also reported significantly higher achievement motivation, academic self-concept, task orientation, rule clarity, and student aspiration scores than students from the ineffective schools.