The Inventory of School Motivation scale (ISM; McInerney, Yeung, & McInerney, 2000, 2001) is a new instrument designed to assess the academic goals of school students which allows students to espouse multiple goals including the socially-oriented, which research indicates are particularly salient to respondents from non-Western cultures. A Hong Kong Chinese version of the ISM was developed and evaluated in two studies involving 163 and 697 Hong Kong Chinese secondary school children. Responses to this questionnaire are shown to have good internal consistency reliability and support is provided for its construct validity in terms of its factorial structure and correlations as predicted with measures of learning strategies and self-esteem. Suggestions for further research using the ISM are provided.

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The current study investigated the hypothesis that groups scoring High, Medium, and Low on Environmental Responsibility would have significantly different materialism profiles using the Materialism Values Scale and the Possession Satisfaction Inventory. Two hundred seventy-one undergraduate students completed the ECOSCALE and the measures of materialism for partial course credit. The results indicated that the three groups had significantly different materialism profiles. More specifically, the High Environmental Responsibility group scored significantly lower than the Low Environmental Responsibility group on the three subscales of the MVS and the PSI, and significantly lower than the Medium Environmental Responsibility group on two of the MVS subscales and the PSI. These results provide further support for the contention that the groups scoring differently on Environmental Responsibility differ in the way they view others and the environment as evidenced by the differences in their personality, values, and materialism profiles.

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The PISA (parallel input serial access) model assumes independence and competition of word-level and letter-level processing (Allen & Madden, 1990; Allen & Emerson, 1991), while the IA (interactive activation) model proposes that word-level and letter-level processing interactively exchange information (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981). This current study attempts to explore which of these two views characterizes the character-component relationship in Chinese character recognition using the component detection task. Experiment 1 found a high-frequency disadvantage for high- and medium-frequency components, a medium-frequency advantage for low-frequency components, and an overall character superiority effect. Experiment 2 cued and blocked the location of the target component and it ruled out an artifact account for findings from Experiment 1. The effect of character structure was also consistent across the two experiments. These findings are not consistent with the straightforward prediction of the PISA or the IA view of character-component relationship and an alternative explanation was considered.

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Relationship among organizational commitment, self-efficacy and perceived psychological barriers to technological change was studied in a sample of 167 male managers selected from Tata Engineering and Locomotive company, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India. Organizational Commitment Scale developed by Allen and Meyer (1990), Generalized Perceived Self-efficacy Scale by Schwarzer and Jerusalem (1995), Questionnaire to measure Psychological Barriers to Technological Change by Ghani and Sugumar (1999) were the tools. Results revealed that organizational commitment is positively related with age, length of service in present cadre and self-efficacy and negatively with psychological barriers to technological change. Psychological barriers to technological change were found to be positively related with age, length of service in present cadre and negatively with self-efficacy. Negative correlation coefficients were found between self-efficacy and age and also between self-efficacy and length of service in present cadre. Multiple regression analysis was done to see the relative contribution of different variables.

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Two experiments examined the role of phonological overlap and form similarity on cognate status effects in Chinese-Japanese bilinguals. Experiment 1 investigated cross-script priming in word-fragment completion by subjects who were either Chinese-Japanese bilingual (22 Chinese students studying in Japan) or Japanese monolingual (56 students). The subjects studied Chinese words and then completed test fragments written in Japanese Hiragana. The transcriptions of the test fragments into Kanji characters were manipulated: identical-cognate, visually similar-cognate, or non-cognate. The results indicated that the completion rate of primed fragments increased for the identical-cognates only. A Chinese lexical decision task was carried out by bilingual subjects (18 Chinese students) in Experiment 2. The decision that items were Chinese was made faster for identical-cognates than it was for visually similar-cognates and non-cognates. The results indicate that phonological overlap is not indispensable for cognate status effect and they are consistent with the non-selective access view of bilinguals.

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The relationship between the scales of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) and Learning Process Questionnaire (LPQ) was examined using an integrated data approach (Skinner, 1977, 1978) that combined features of multiple regression analysis, canonical correlation, and multiple-set factor analysis. Results based on a Hong Kong sample of upper primary and lower secondary students generally agreed with expectations of how the scales in these two instruments would be associated. The LPQ surface scale paired with the MSLQ test anxiety scale, while the LPQ deep scale paired with the MSLQ intrinsic value scale and the LPQ achieving scale paired with the self-efficacy scale. However, contrary to expectations, the MSLQ cognitive strategy-use scale paired with the LPQ deep scale, while the MSLQ self-regulation scale paired with the LPQ achieving scale. It is suggested that the MSLQ self-regulation scale is a measure of efficient study strategies characteristically used by achieving oriented students. In contrast, it is argued that students adopting a deep approach to learning need the requisite cognitive skills for this approach to be self-motivating.

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