This study set out to develop a Chinese Author Recognition Test (CART) that might be used as a measure of objective print exposure for college students in Taiwan. We found that there is a linkage between print exposure and general reading achievement for college students. We also found that, among self‐reported reading habits, comparative reading habits and CART, primary print knowledge scores within the CART family have the strongest prediction power for both the ‘General Scholastic Ability Test‐Chinese’ and the ‘Department Required Test‐Chinese’ beyond the joint contributions of vocabulary size and reading comprehension. By sharing the process of developing the instrument, we shed some light for researchers from regions other than English‐speaking countries on how they might move forward in future investigations.

This study presents the profiles of heavy Internet users and provides empirical evidence that it is not how much time university students spend online but what they do online that is associated with academic grades and psychological adjustment. Using a nationally representative sample from Taiwan, we employed K-mean cluster analysis and identified profiles based on nine Internet practices in which users engaged. Female heavy users favoring information seeking and chatting had better academic performance but tended to feel more depressed than nonheavy users, while those favoring information seeking, chatting, and online games had lower academic grades and greater loneliness, physical illness, and depression scores than nonheavy users. In contrast, only male heavy users favoring online games had lower academic grades, whereas those who favored information seeking, chatting, and online games were more likely than nonheavy users to feel physically ill and depressed.

The Chinese people have great regard for those who read widely, yet little is known of the extracurricular reading behaviors of Chinese students. This study drew on data from two national surveys to investigate the amount of time Taiwanese college students spend on extracurricular reading. Findings are interpreted in relation to prior research on the reading habits of college students internationally. The study found that Female students on average did not spend more time on extracurricular reading than males Students from public institutions, who generally have higher academic competence, did not spend more time reading than students from private institutions Education majors spent the least time on extracurricular reading Newspapers, magazines, and bestsellers were the most popular reading materials, but manga (graphic novels) had medium popularity Crosscultural differences might have an impact on the amount of time spent reading and on reading interests

The purposes of this study were to explore the relationships between physical function, knowledge of disease, social support, and self-care behavior in patients with rheumatoid arthritis and to examine the predictive variables of self-care behavior. A cross-sectional design was developed and implemented in which 115 subjects with rheumatoid arthritis were recruited from two hospitals located in southern Taiwan. Findings demonstrated a significantly positive correlation between self-care behavior and age, physical function and social support. Age and social support represented the effective predictors of self-care behavior, explaining 13.4% of total self-care behavior variance. Study results suggest that healthcare providers should better understand the predictive factors of self-care behavior, design effective interventions and provide therapeutic information in order to facilitate better self-care behavior in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

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