The Penn State College of Medicine Professionalism Questionnaire is one of the first valid and reliable surveys of attitudes among medical students, residents, and faculty that reflects seven elements of professionalism.

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This paper introduces a new affective instrument for assessing the reader self-perceptions of students in grades seven through ten. The Reader Self-Perception Scale 2 (RSPS2) builds upon its predecessor, the RSPS, a tool that measures the reading efficacy beliefs of children in grades four through six. New items were created for the RSPS2 to reflect differences in the expectations for adolescent reading. The instrument was piloted on 488 students, revised, and then validates with an additional 2,542 students in the target grades. Factor analytic procedures revealed four factors emerging on the RSPS2. Items for Progress, Observational Comparison, Social Feedback, and Physiological States clustered as expected into scales with reliabilities ranging from .87 to .95. The article includes a description of the instrument, an explanation of its possible uses in assessment, instruction, and research, as well as directions for administration, scoring, and interpretation.

An increasing number of recent research studies suggest connections between cognition, social and emotional development, and the arts. Some studies indicate that students in schools where the arts are an integral part of the academic program tend to do better in school than those students where that is not the case. This study examines home/school factors that contribute most to variance in student learning and achievement and the arts from over 8,000 students in grade 5.The findings suggest in-school arts programs may have less of an impact on student achievement than proposed by previous research. Cognition and Student Learning through the Arts 3For as long as humankind has been able to think logically, we have thought about thinking: What is it that enables us to learn and what is happening physiologically, psychologically, and educationally? As a modern society we have been trying for more than a hundred years to understand "how the brain works," and the renewed interest during the last thirty years in formalizing cognition has intrigued both practitioners and researchers who believe that there are positive effects on the academic achievement of students engaged in the arts. It has taken centuries for thinkers to uncover evidence of arts cognition, the "emotive" part of who we are. The objective of this research is to explore the relationships among school and home-based characteristics related to involvement in the arts and its impact on student learning. Background

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lthough the highly popular Accelerated Reader (AR) book reading incentive program claims to motivate children of all reading ability levels, very little independent empirical research has examined this assertion. To help fill this void, we used two related three-factor mixed designs with Method (AR vs. Control), Gender; and either Grade Level (fourth vs. fifth) or Reading Ability (high vs. low) to explore AR's influence on the reading attitudes and self-perceptions of children intwo comparable school districts. The analyses indicatethat ARpositively influenced academic reading attitudes, but not recreational ones, and that it negatively influenced two types of self-perceptions in low achieving male readers. These findings and others ofconsequence arediscussed along with implications for future research.

Instrument developers find conflicting advice in the literature about either grouping items together that purport to measure each construct or to randomly intersperse items throughout the instrument. This paper examines the effects of grouping and random item placement on the alpha internal-consistency reliabilities of the scales and scale means on an affective measure. Out of a total of 992 randomly selected principals, 719 responded to the Administrative Attitudes Toward Unsatisfactory Teachers Survey; 350 received a grouped-item version of the instrument and 369, a random-item version. While there were no significant differences in scale means between the two methods of item placement, there was an effect on the scale alpha reliabilities.

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