Abstract
The Taiwan Student Physical And Mental Development Study (PAMD) is a basic educational research study aiming at constructing an educational database to collect adolescent students’ schooling performance, as well as their physical and mental developmental data. Indicators of schooling performance in PAMD includes GPA, physical and mental health, and adaptive behavior. Targeted indicators of physical and mental development are directly related to learning, such as aptitude, cognitive and learning strategy, motivation, and self-relevance variables. A stratified cluster method was used to select year 2007 sample from schools in 25 counties of Taiwan. Three thousand seven hundred and thirty four students were in the resulting sample, with 1313 5th graders, 1332 7th graders and 1098 10th graders. The 2008 study will be a smaller scale panel study. PAMD is distinctive in that, (1) it provides both cross sectional and panel data. (2) It provides cross sectional data to compare schooling performances in various implementing stages of the “Grade 1-9 Curriculum.” (3) It gathers multiple indicators of adolescent physical and mental development that are directly related to learning. (4) It collects multiple indicators of adolescents’ schooling performance. (5) It includes cognitive, affective and behavioral data as well as (6) domain general versus domain specific data. (7) It presents data to analyze individual versus group differences. And finally, (8) it affords both policy making and theoretical improvement capacity. The construction of PAMD supplies data that TASA and TEPS, two educational databases, failed to include.