Declining enrollments in engineering programs, pressure from state legislatures, and accreditation have made student retention a major issue. Community building, mentoring and learning style models are some of the approaches used to improve retention. Retention studies have shown that high school grades and admission tests (SAT scores) are two of the more reliable pre-college indicators of succ...

The relationships between perceived multiple intelligences and musical aptitude were examined in 298 Chinese gifted students in Hong Kong. Self-perceived musical intelligence consistently emerged as the significant predictor of global musical aptitude, and its components of tonal imagery, rhythm imagery, and musical sensitivity, suggesting that self-perceptions did reflect actual abilities. How...

According to prevailing views, brain organization is modulated by practice, e.g., during musical or linguistic training. Most recent results, using both neuropsychological tests and brain measures, revealed an intriguing connection between musical aptitude and second language linguistic abilities. A significant relationship between higher musical aptitude, better second language pronunciation s...

Although siblings are thought to be influential in child development, little is known about the influence of sibling status on the health of older adults. Using structural equation modeling, the authors created and tested a series of models with data from a sample (N = 3,968) of 1957 high school graduates from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. The results indicated that socioeconomic status of ...

We used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to examine the effect of various family structures on behavioral and cognitive outcomes for children aged 7 to 10. We extended previous research by using a longitudinal definition of family structure and by exploring multiple mechanisms through which family structure may affect children in 2 outcome domains. We found that family income...

BACKGROUND Measures used for medical student selection should predict future performance during training. A problem for any selection study is that predictor-outcome correlations are known only in those who have been selected, whereas selectors need to know how measures would predict in the entire pool of applicants. That problem of interpretation can be solved by calculating construct-level pr...

This study aimed at examining the main and interaction effects of increased intentional reasoning demands, planning time, and also language learning aptitude on syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and fluency (CALF) of 226 EFL learners’ performance on letter writing tasks. The participants were first randomly assigned to three experimental groups to be given a task with differin...

Researchers use five different approaches as they try to learn more about what makes a good teacher. "What makes a good teacher?" is a question that fascinates parents, educators, and behavioral scientists. Several variations of this question occur in the litera ture of research on teaching and teacher effectiveness. Behaviorists ask which teacher behaviors are system atically and causally rela...

Selection of military pilots has long included the use of multiple aptitude test batteries. Although the names and appearances of the tests used in pilot selection vary, most are to a large extent measures of general cognitive ability, or g. This is consistent with the central role played by cognitive ability measures in the prediction of numerous job training (r = 0.43) and performance (r = 0....

Previous research suggests that mastering languages with distinct rather than similar rhythmic properties enhances musical rhythmic perception. This study investigates whether learning a second language (L2) contributes to enhanced musical rhythmic perception in general, regardless of first and second languages rhythmic properties. Additionally, we investigated whether this perceptual enhanceme...