Psychometric characteristics of the BRIEF scale for the assessment of executive functions in Spanish clinical population.

Background: The Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Functions (BRIEF) scale, completed by families, is widely known in the assessment of executive functions in children and adolescents. However, its application is limited to English-speaking population.

Method: This study analyzes the preliminary results from its application in a Spanish clinical sample, comprising 125 participants aged 5-18 years.

[Efficacy of the program "Testas's (mis)adventures" to promote the deep approach to learning].

This paper provides information about the efficacy of a tutorial training program intended to enhance elementary fifth graders' study processes and foster their deep approaches to learning. The program "Testas's (mis)adventures" consists of a set of books in which Testas, a typical student, reveals and reflects upon his life experiences during school years. These life stories are nothing but an opportunity to present and train a wide range of learning strategies and self-regulatory processes, designed to insure students' deeper preparation for present and future learning challenges.

[Intellectual styles and academic achievement: a developmental perspective].

The aim of the present study is to provide additional information to highlight some aspects concerning the relationship between thinking styles and academic achievement. In order to understand the extent to which thinking styles predict academic achievement, 1466 students, between 12 and 16 years old, from first to fourth grades of Compulsory Secondary Education (Spanish ESO) took part in the research. A parsimonious model of covariances was assumed in each of the four samples corresponding to the four different grades of Secondary School as well as in the total sample.

Self-regulated profiles and academic achievement.

To date, research on the relation between learning self-regulation and academic achievement has generally show disparate results. This work intends to look into this relation from a new perspective, which consists in classifying the students as more or less self-regulated depending on diverse indicators and using cluster analysis. The aim of this work was to identify the possible self-regulated learning profiles in a sample of university students.

[Computerized hypertextual strategy and personal construction of meaning].

The aim of this study is to provide information about the effects of strategic training in the area of social sciences (1) on the real level, as well as perceived competence in terms of the students' skills to select, organise and produce information; and (2) on their attitude and motivation towards working in this area of the curriculum. 107 students took part in this study, 57 of whom were the control group and 50 the experimental one. They were all enrolled in the third year of secondary school (9th year).

[Multimodal intervention program to improve attention deficits].

Is it possible to learn to attend? The purpose of this article is to provide information about the development, administration, and contrast of an intervention program to improve selective and sustained attention in students from 5 to 19 years of age, all attending school, and with difficulties to learn the academic materials corresponding to their age. Two groups participated in the study: one with difficulties in selective attention and the other with difficulties in sustained attention. The group with selective attention difficulties was made up of 102 students, of whom 59 made up the experimental group and 43 the control group.

[Evaluation of violent behaviors in secondary school].

School harassment, or bullying, is a term that for being so frequent already forms a part of our vocabulary. In the present work one presents a new instrument of evaluation of the violence that happens in the school centers. The Questionnaire of School Violence (CUVE) has been elaborated and, later, applied to a sample of 1637 teenagers of seven centers of Secondary Obligatory Education (public and compound).

[Self regulation processes measurement through self-report methodology].

Nowadays the evaluation of self-regulated learning processes is having a critical time due to the problems concerning the assessment instruments. This paper presents the outcomes of a research study having a main goal: evaluate to what extent student's consciousness of his/her own self-regulated learning and study processes (and the involved strategies and activities) has a significant impact on the quality of his/her answers on self-report type instruments. In order to prove this hypothesis an experimental study was designed and built including a pre and a post-test, having no control group, using a sample of 90 college students from different degree courses.