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The motivation of students is an important issue in higher education, particularly in the context of the increasing diversity of student populations. A social-cognitive perspective assumes motivation to be dynamic, context-sensitive and changeable, thereby rendering it to be a much more differentiated construct than previously understood. This complexity may be perplexing to tutors who are keen to develop applications to improve academic achievement. One application that is within the control of the tutor, at least to some extent, is the use of praise. Using psychological literature, the article argues that in motivating students, the tutor is not well served by relying on simplistic and common sense understandings of the construct of praise and that effective applications of praise are mediated by students' goal orientations, which of themselves may be either additive or interactive composites of different objectives and different contexts.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to identify predictors of achievement in mathematics in elementary schools in New Brunswick (Canada). Data Collection: Both teachers and school leaders (N = 111) completed a questionnaire on their practices and on school functioning. Findings: Multiple regression analyses revealed that the students' achievement in mathematics was determined by prior achievement, urban school attendance, and teaching quality. Implications: To counter the socioeconomic constraints on achievement in mathematics, taking a closer look at teaching quality represents a promising research area. The implications of this study on education policies and research are discussed. L'objectif de cette étude était d'identifier les indicateurs de la réussite en mathématiques dans les écoles primaires du Nouveau-Brunswick (Canada). La cueillette de données s'est réalisée par un questionnaire administré aux enseignants et aux directions d'école (N=111) portant sur les pratiques d'enseignement et le fonctionnement de l'école. Des analyses de régression multiple ont révélé que le rendement des élèves en mathématiques était déterminé par les résultats antérieurs, la fréquentation d'écoles en milieu urbain et la qualité de l'enseignement. Comme stratégie pour contrebalancer les contraintes socioéconomiques qui agissent sur le rendement en mathématiques, la qualité de l'enseignement représente un domaine de recherche prometteur. Nous discutons des incidences de cette étude sur les politiques et la recherche en éducation.

Research has shown that birthweight has a lasting impact on later-life outcomes such as educational attainment and earnings. This paper examines the role of health at birth in determining academic achievement in childhood, which may provide the link between birthweight and adult outcomes. Using three waves of the PSID-CDS data over 1997-2009, we build on the literature by employing fetal growth rate as a proxy for nutritional intake in utero and propose a nested error-component two-stage least squares (NEC2SLS) estimator that draws on internal instruments from alternative dimensions of the multi-level panel data set. In particular, this alternative estimator allows us to exploit the information on children with no siblings in the sample, which comprises over 40 percent of the observations in our sample, as well as to obtain coefficient estimates for the time-invariant variables such as race and maternal education. This would not be feasible with the usual mother fixed effects estimation. We obtain modest but significant effects of fetal growth rate on math and reading scores, with the effects concentrated in the low birthweight range. Infant health measures appear to explain little of the well-documented racial disparity in test scores.

This paper provides new evidence on the effect of pupils' self-motivation on academic achievement in science across countries. By using the OECD´s Programme for International Student Assessment 2006 (PISA 2006) test, we find that self-motivation has a positive effect on students' performance. Instrumental Variables Quantile Regression is used to analyze the existence of different estimated coefficients over the scores distribution, allowing us to deal with the potential endogeneity of self-motivation. We find that the impact of intrinsic motivation on academic performance depends on the pupil's score. Our findings support the importance of designing focalized programs for different populations that foster their motivation towards learning.

Many studies have investigated mothers' impact on students' achievement, yet little is known about how various father types impact students' school performance. This study examines 6 mutually exclusive categories of father type: resident biological fathers, resident stepfathers, resident adoptive fathers, non­resident biological fathers, unknown biological fathers, and deceased fathers. Adolescents' school performance from seventh through twelfth grade is examined using data from 3 waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a nationally representative United States secondary data source. Findings indicate different types of fathers have distinct and independent positive associations with adolescents' school achievement, after controlling for mother involvement. Adolescents with resident biological fathers had higher school performance than adolescents with nonresident fathers. Adolescents with stepfathers had higher rates of school failure than their peers living with their biological parents. The lowest achievement and the highest risk of school failure and course failure were experienced by those adolescents who did not have a resident father figure and didn't know the identity of their fathers. Implications include the need to model for the unique influence of father involvement and father type on academic achievement, and the inclusion of unique family contexts in efforts to increase adolescents' school involvement and integration.

Abstract
In this paper I consider the impact of attending a selective high school in the UK. Students are assigned to these schools on the basis of a test taken in primary school and, using data on these assignment test scores for a particular district, I exploit this rule to estimate the causal effects of selective schools on test scores, high school course taking and university enrollment. Despite the huge peer advantage enjoyed by selective school students, I show that four years of selective school attendance generates at best small effects on test scores. Selective schools do however have positive effects on course-taking and, more suggestively, university enrollment, evidence suggesting they may have important longer run impacts.