When teachers are more supportive of autonomy and less controlling, students demonstrate higher levels of intrinsic motivation and self-determination. The purpose of this study was to examine socialcontextual conditions that led teachers (N ϭ 254) who taught classes from Grades 1 to 12 to be more autonomy supportive versus controlling with their students. Using structural equation modeling, the authors observed that the more teachers perceive pressure from above (they have to comply with a curriculum, with colleagues, and with performance standards) and pressure from below (they perceived their students to be nonself-determined), the less they are self-determined toward teaching. In turn, the less they are self-determined toward teaching, the more they become controlling with students.

No abstract

The purposes of this study were to derive a new method for identifying resilience (i.e. positive adaptation in spite of serious adversity) among young people in care and to determine the percentage of the latter who experienced resilience on selected outcomes, as conceptualized from within the developmental approach of Looking After Children. The participants comprised two samples of young people who were living in out‐of‐home care (mainly foster care) in the province of Ontario, Canada, 340 aged 10–15 years and 132 aged 5–9 years. Virtually all had experienced severe adversity in their families of origin, such that in most cases the legal custody, care, and control of the young people had been permanently transferred from their parents to a local Children's Aid Society. Corresponding to each in‐care sample was a general‐population sample of the same age range that served as a normative comparison group and was drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY). The NLSCY is an ongoing, long‐term social‐policy study of the development of a nationally representative sample of Canadian children into adolescence and early adulthood. The general‐population samples were composed, respectively, of 5539 young people aged 10–15 years and 11 858 children aged 5–9 years. Resilience among the young people in care was operationally defined, on each outcome variable, as average or above‐average functioning relative to that of the general‐population sample of the same age range. The percentage experiencing resilience was relatively high on the outcomes of health, self‐esteem, and pro‐social behaviour, moderate on the outcomes of relationship with friends and anxiety and emotional distress, and low on the outcome of academic performance. The implications of the findings are discussed.

Satisfaction with environmental conditions and government policies are hypothesized to play an important role in the genesis of proenvironmental behaviors. Given the absence of a scale measuring these constructs, two studies were conducted for the purpose of constructing and vaidating the Environmental Satisfaction Scale (ESS). The ESS consists of two subscales measuring individuals' satisfaction with local environmental conditions and with government policies. In the first study, a prototype of the ESS was constructed, and Its psychometric properties were evaluated. Results supported the factorial structure of the scale and showed satisfactory levels of internal consistency. In the second study, subjects completed the revised ESS, the Motivation Towards the Environment Scale, and various measures of environmental attitudes and behaviors. Results supported the by dimensional factorial structure and construct validity of the scale. Implications for the use of the ESS in future research on the environment are discussed.