Maikling Kwento

1. A literature review on the relationship between locus of control (LOC) and academic achievement revealed that more internal beliefs are associated with greater academic achievement and that the magnitude of this relation is small to medium. Characteristics of the participants in the reviewed studies and the nature of the LOC and academic achievement measures were investigated as mediators of the relation. The relation tended to be stronger for adolescents than for adults or children. The relation was more substantial among males than among females. Stronger effects were associated with specific LOC measures and with standardized achievement or intelligence tests than with teacher grades. (30 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

2. Abstract

3. The idea that parental involvement has positive influence on students’ academic achievement is so intuitively appealing that society in general, and educators in particular, have considered parental involvement an important ingredient for the remedy for many problems in education. The vast proportion of the literature in this area, however, is qualitative and nonempirical. Among the empirical studies that have investigated the issue quantitatively, there appear to be considerable inconsistencies. A meta-analysis was conducted to synthesize the quantitative literature about the relationship between parental involvement and students’ academic achievement.

The findings reveal a small to moderate, and practically meaningful, relationship between parental involvement and academic achievement. Through moderator analysis, it was revealed that parental aspiration/expectation for children’s education achievement has the strongest relationship, whereas parental home supervision has the weakest relationship, with students’ academic achievement. In addition, the relationship is stronger when academic achievement is represented by a global indicator (e.g., GPA) than by a subject-specific indicator (e.g., math grade). Limitations of the study are noted, and suggestions are made for future studies.

Abstract

Clinicians and researchers without a suitable health-related quality of life (HRQOL) measure in their own language have two choices: (1) to develop a new measure, or (2) to modify a measure previously validated in another language, known as a cross-cultural adaptation process. We propose a set of standardized guidelines for this process based on previous research in psychology and sociology and on published methodological frameworks.

These guidelines include recommendations for obtaining semantic, idiomatic, experiential and conceptual equivalence in translation by using back-translation techniques and committee review, pre-testing techniques and re-examining the weights of scores. We applied these guidelines to 17 cross-cultural adaptation of HRQOL measures identified through a comprehensive literature review. The reporting standards varied across studies but agreement between raters in their ratings of the studies was substantial to almost perfect (weighted κ = 0.66–0.93) suggesting that the guidelines are easy to apply. Further research is necessary in order to delineate essential versus optional steps in the adaptation process.

Keywords
Quality of life;
Health status index;
Cross-cultural comparison;
Culture;
Validity;
Guidelines
All correspondence should be addressed to: Dr Francis Guillemin, Ecole de Santé Publique, Faculté de Médecine BP 184, 54 505 Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy Cedex, France. Copyright © 1993 Published by Elsevier Inc.