Gregory Arief D. Liem

National Institute of Education | nie · Psychology and Child & Human Development

The purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis is twofold: (a) to understand how the three key student engagement dimensions (i.e., affective, behavioral, and cognitive) have been conceptualized, operationalized, and measured by researchers in the field and (b) to examine the extent to which the construct, its dimensions, and subtypes are...

Background: There is growing interest in studying the co-occurrence of multiple achievement goals and how different goal profiles relate to educational outcomes. Further, contextual aspects of the classroom have been known to influence the goals students pursue but existing studies remain confined within certain traditions and confounded by method...

This tribute celebrates the distinguished scholarship and extraordinary life of Dennis Michael McInerney, who passed away in Hong Kong on May 20th, 2022. It is a testimony of his impact on our professional and personal lives while highlighting the multitude and depth of his scholarly contributions. McInerney was one of those thinkers who invited us...

Large-scale international assessments have shown that students from different Asia-Pacific countries and economies differ from their Western counterparts in their levels of academic achievement. This chapter offers a potential theoretical advancement that achievement goals, as an achievement motivation construct, could be used to explain such cross...

Participation in co-curricular activities (CCAs) has been recognized as a vital avenue for students’ holistic developments and acquisition of twenty-first century competencies. However, there is a lack of research in Singapore and Southeast Asia region that comprehensively and systematically assessed the effect of CCA participation on students’ dev...

Participation in school-organized co-curricular activities (CCAs) provides opportunities for youth to develop their interests, talents, and abilities. However, would students still reap the benefits of CCA if their participation is not voluntary? This study, conducted in Singapore schools where CCA is mandatory, investigated the impact of CCA on ad...

Our understanding of multiple goals has been advanced through the lines of research that focus on their pursuit of academic achievement goals and of academic and social goals. These prior efforts, however, are not free from conceptual and methodological limitations. To further advance the field, we put this paper together with two purposes in mind....

This Singapore study involved a sample of 3776 secondary school students to examine the role of educational hope in moderating the relationships between teacher-student relationship dimensions (instrumental help, emotional support, relationship satisfaction, relationship conflict) and student engagement dimensions (perceived importance of schooling...

In this investigation of high school students (N = 2510) in Singapore (Study 1) and elementary school students (N = 119) in Australia (Study 2), we examined the role of instrumental and emotional forms of teacher support in students' academic buoyancy and academic outcomes (engagement and academic skills). In both studies, perceived instrumental su...

Goal complexes, which are formed by pairing standards of competence strivings with their underlying reasons, are essential to an understanding of achievement goal regulation. This paper examines goal complexes that cross other-approach and other-avoidance goals with the approach-avoidance dimensions of Big Three motives as underlying reasons. 220 u...

Notwithstanding its crucial role in facilitating desired outcomes of schooling, educational psychology researchers have recognized the conceptual haziness of student engagement as a multidimensional construct. With the main purpose of refining its conceptual definition, this paper aims to attain the following four goals. First, we seek to highlight...

This study probed the cognitive mechanisms that underlie order processing for number symbols, specifically the extent to which the direction and format in which number symbols are presented influence the processing of numerical order, as well as the extent to which the relationship between order processing and mathematical achievement is specific t...

This study used latent class analysis to examine whether multiple subgroups can be identified based on rule-breaking and aggressive behavior in school-based and at-risk adolescent samples. These groups were tested for differences in behavioral, emotional, personality and interpersonal correlates. Rule breaking and aggressive behavior co-occurred ac...

This study investigated the mediational relationship between teachers’ perceived school goal structure, achievement goals and emotions in teaching. The participants were 495 Singapore teachers who took an online survey on the measured variables. We conducted structural equation modelling to test the hypothesized mediation model and found that teach...

Academic buoyancy is a construct relevant to the schooling lives of students, defining how they overcome or ‘bounce back’ from everyday academic adversity. The present study was correlational in design and examined academic buoyancy in 191 upper primary-aged students, focusing on its association with reading and mathematics performance, and the ext...

In- and out-of-school participation in the arts has been shown to be positively associated with students' academic and nonacademic outcomes. Despite this finding, little work has examined the motivational processes that underpin arts participation, either as separate types (e.g., active vs. receptive) or as an overarching factor. However, given the...

This study investigated the interaction between self-efficacy and implicit beliefs of ability in their association with maladaptive learning in mathematics. The analysis was based on a large sample of 2538 Singapore Secondary 2 students (Mage = 13.75), who took measures of entity beliefs of ability, self-efficacy, and three maladaptive learning var...

Introduction: This exploratory study extends research on student engagement by examining the relationships between its different facets, students' perception of teacher support for learning and self-efficacy, and adaptive youth competencies. Guided by Reschly and Christenson's (2012) student engagement framework, affective and cognitive engagement...

This third millennium has been variously characterized by sociologists, economists and futurists as the Creative Age, the Digital Age, and the Conceptual Age, just to name a few. Semantic differences aside, these labels reflect a shared acknowledgement that our twenty-first century social and economic landscape bears distinctive features that sets...

This study aimed to develop and examine the effects of a socially oriented gratitude intervention (SOGI) on secondary students’ gratitude level and interpersonal relationships. To these ends, we used a quasi-experimental research design: The experimental group (n=46) participated in the two-week intervention during a class subject focusing on chara...

The present study extends the literature by investigating the relative salience of self- and collective efficacy in predicting group performance among early adolescents in Indonesia. A total of 435 early adolescents (mean age 11.70 years, 53% female) were randomly assigned to groups of three to four and completed three group tasks (task 1: puzzles;...

The purpose of the current study was to identify the motivation profiles at the intraindividual level using a latent profile analyses (LPA) approach. A total of 1151 secondary school students aged 13 to 17 years old from Singapore took part in the study. Using LPA, four distinct motivational profiles were identified based on four motivation regulat...

Education in Singapore strives to foster the holistic development of its youth. To attain this goal, social and emotional learning (SEL) has been an integral part of the academic curricula at the different levels of schooling. The SEL Framework, which was formally introduced by the Ministry of Education in 2005 (see Ministry of Education 2008) and...

This study seeks to understand the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of student engagement by investigating the ‘aims’ that students pursue through engagement (i.e., their achievement goals) and the ‘reasons’ driving such engagement (i.e., their motivation). Self-report instruments measuring students’ motivational reasons, achievement goals, and engagement in t...

In the context of “academic momentum,” a longitudinal study of university students (N = 904) showed high school achievement and ongoing university achievement predicted subsequent achievement through university. However, the impact of high school achievement diminished, while additive effects of ongoing university achievement continued. Deferred en...

This longitudinal study examines the relationship between young people's creative and performing arts participation (e.g., in dance, drama, film, music, visual arts) and their arts self-concept. Drawing on the positive youth development (PYD) framework and the reciprocal effects model (REM) of self-concept, a cross-lagged panel design is implemente...

This study explored the role of student (e.g., age, language background, gender), home (e.g., parent/caregiver education), and school (e.g., school type, size) socio-demographic factors in students’ school (e.g., in-school arts tuition, arts engagement), home (e.g., parent/caregiver–child arts interaction), and community (e.g., arts attendance, art...

Watkins (Watkins DA, Ismail M, Contemp Educ Psychol 19:483–488, 1994) argued for the possible link between cross-cultural differences in approaches to learning and in cultural value dimensions such as individualism–collectivism. Based on the data derived from Australia and Indonesia (representing individualist and collectivist societies, respective...

“Teach Less, Learn More” (TLLM) is an educational approach initiated in 2004 by the Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Hsien Loong in fostering Singapore students’ intrinsic motivation in both academic and nonacademic arenas such that they are better prepared to face future life challenges. Achievement goal theorists have proposed different types of g...

Students' pursuit of academic and social goals has implications for school functioning. However, studies on academic and social achievement goals have been relatively independent and mainly conducted with students in culturally Western settings. Guided by multiple-goal perspectives, this study examined the role of academic and social achievement go...

Based on a sample of over 2000 Australian adolescents (Mage = 14.5 years; 51% girls), this investigation explores the extent to which young people’s adaptability and personality are associated with their responses to environmental issues. Controlling for the effects of socio-demographic and prior achievement, structural equation modeling showed tha...

Background With children today being tested at younger ages, test anxiety has an earlier onset age. There is relatively limited research on test anxiety management programs with elementary school children. The theoretical basis for this nonrandomized pre-post intervention study is grounded in cognitive and behavioral interventions for test anxiety...

The negative impacts of failure and failure dynamics are well established. This study explores adaptability and control as factors reducing failure dynamics. The present study centers on a mediation model in which adaptability is hypothesized to enhance control, and control is hypothesized to reduce failure dynamics (anxiety, performance avoidance,...

The main claim of the present study is that regulatory focus (i.e., promotion vs. prevention orientations) is an important explanatory variable of cross-cultural differences in actual and self-reported achievement-related behaviors and preferences, which include a component of autonomy. It adds explained variance in behavior above and beyond that o...

An etic approach was used to describe the values of Filipino adolescents and to show how pan-cultural comparisons using a values survey can complement emic approaches to studying values. Participants were 752 adolescents who answered the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ). The results indicate that PVQ has structural validity and adequate internal...

Structural validity studies of Big Five measures using confirmatory factor analysis often yield mixed levels of fit. However, substantial evidence of criterion-related validity also exists for such measures. We investigated the structural and concurrent validity of a recently developed, short, trait-descriptor-based Big Five measure with a large sa...

Boarding school has been a feature of education systems for centuries. Minimal large-scale quantitative data have been collected to examine its association with important educational and other outcomes. The present study represents one of the largest studies into boarding school conducted to date. It investigates boarding school and students’ motiv...

The study examined the relations between academic achievement and self-concepts in a sample of 1,067 seventh-grade students from 3 core ability streams in Singapore secondary education. Although between-stream differences in achievement were large, between-stream differences in academic self-concepts were negligible. Within each stream, levels of s...

In the context of “academic momentum,” a longitudinal study of university students (N = 904) showed high school achievement and ongoing university achievement predicted subsequent achievement through university. However, the impact of high school achievement diminished, while additive effects of ongoing university achievement continued. Deferred en...

Adaptability is defined as appropriate cognitive, behavioral, and/or affective adjustment in the face of uncertainty and novelty. Building on prior measurement work demonstrating the psychometric properties of an adaptability construct, the present study investigates dispositional predictors (personality, implicit theories) of adaptability, and the...

The present study assessed the mediating role of expectancy for success and value beliefs in civic education in linking socio-academic factors (gender, ethnicity, school level and prior achievement) to desirable civic attributes. The sample comprised 1664 students in their Year-7–Year-12 (mean age = 14.79, range = 12–18). Structural equation modell...

Drawing on the Programme for International Student Assessment 2003 data set comprising over 190,000 15-year-old students in 25 countries, the current study sought to examine the role of arts-related information and communication technology (ICT) use in students’ problem-solving skill and science and mathematics achievement. Structural equation mode...

The application of latent variable modeling in various areas of psychological research has dramatically grown in popularity over the past three decades (see e.g., Breckler, 1990; Hershberger, 2003; MacCallum & Austin, 2000; Tomarken & Waller, 2005; Tremblay & Gardner, 1996 for systematic reviews). This growth is also apparent in educational psychol...

The present study investigates problem-solving skill alongside more widely recognized settlement and sociodemographic factors in first-generation (1G) and second-generation (2G) immigrant students' science and mathematics achievement. A total of 113,767 students (ages 15–16 years) from 17 countries were drawn from the 2003 Programme for Internation...

The present longitudinal investigation explored the extent to which physical wellbeing predicts psychological wellbeing in a sample transitioning from school to postschool life. The study comprised 213 young people assessed in their final year of high school (T1) and then one year later (T2). Longitudinal structural equation modeling supported hypo...

Personal best goals (PB goals) articulate a target performance standard that matches or exceeds one’s previous best. This study examined the role of PB goals in academic and social functioning. Alongside academic and social outcome measures, PB goal items were administered to 249 high-school students at the beginning and end of their school year. L...

Adaptability is proposed as individuals’ capacity to constructively regulate psycho-behavioral functions in response to new, changing, and/or uncertain circumstances, conditions and situations. The present investigation explored the internal and external validity of an hypothesised adaptability scale. The sample comprised 2,731 high school students...

The current research integrated components of the transactional model of stress and coping with self-worth and goal theories to examine a model where (a) teachers’ goal orientation (as indicated by mastery and failure avoidance) was hypothesized to predict their teaching coping strategies (as indicated by problem- and emotion-focused coping) and (b...

The study tested three theoretically/conceptually hypothesized longitudinal models of academic processes leading to academic performance. Based on a longitudinal sample of 1866 high-school students across two consecutive years of high school (Time 1 and Time 2), the model with the most superior heuristic value demonstrated: (a) academic motivation...

The big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE) was evaluated with 4,461 seventh to ninth graders in Singapore where a national policy of ability streaming is implemented. Consistent with the BFLPE, when prior achievement was controlled, students in the high-ability stream had lower English and mathematics self-concepts (ESCs and MSCs) and those in the low...

With a view to understand the influence of culture on achievement motivation, the study aimed to test the hypothesized mediating role of individual-oriented and social-oriented achievement motives in linking value orientations (e.g. achievement, security, conformity, hedonism) to achievement goals (i.e. mastery-approach, mastery-avoidance, performa...

In this chapter, we describe correlational research (focussing on confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modelling, and multilevel modelling) through a construct validity lens, outline historical roots and developments in methodology that underpin modern measurement and correlational modelling, and summarise the types of knowledge that c...

The Motivation and Engagement Wheel is a multidimensional conceptual framework that represents salient cognitive and behavioural dimensions relevant to motivation and engagement. The Wheel and its accompanying assessment tool—the Motivation and Engagement Scale (MES)—comprise eleven first-order factors (under four higher-order factors): self-effica...