The first substantial group of American visitors in the 1830s, few of whom knew much about French culture or even spoke the language, were struck above all by Paris as "a continuing lesson in the enjoyment to be found in such simple, unhurried occupations as a walk in a garden....{O}ne learned to take time to savor life".
In almost all schools there was evidence that the new curriculum was having a positive impact on students' progress in lessons and their enjoyment of learning, but it was too early to see any significant impact on standards, Ofsted said.
These mediators in turn are related to students' enjoyment of lessons, which represents the theoretically dependent variable (DV).
Owing to moderate between-class variability, the standardized coefficients available for mediation models in Mplus are indeed very high for our variables (on average, β = .7 for relations of teaching characteristics with students' enjoyment of lessons).
Following this rationale, we expect teaching characteristics that assumedly enhance students' appraisals of coping potential, inherent pleasure and instrumental utility to be generally beneficial to students' enjoyment of lessons (Bieg et al. 2013; section on "Mechanisms and mediators…").
Relations of clarity and support, enthusiastic teaching, and application orientation with students' enjoyment of lessons are all substantially stronger in social classes than in commercial and technical classes (∆b ranging from −.288 to −.492).
With the purpose of identifying the net associations of class-level factors with students' habitual enjoyment of lessons, we therefore estimate multilevel models that include academic self-efficacy as an independent variable at the student level.
By using multilevel latent contextual models (Marsh et al. 2009), we aimed to explain between-class variation regarding students' habitual enjoyment of lessons (rather than intra-individual variations in transient, momentary emotional states) while controlling for the confounding effects of academic self-efficacy beliefs on enjoyment ratings at the student level of analysis.
Finally, although we could demonstrate varying strengths of positive associations between teaching characteristics and students' enjoyment of lessons across different domains of initial vocational training (while ensuring measurement invariance of the relevant constructs), we cannot yet infer why this is the case.
